My Amish Childhood

by Jerry S. Eicher

  After Grandfather’s death, life was soon back to normal—surprisingly soon. The chicken thieves hardly missed a beat, their fingers becoming increasingly busy. No lock or device seemed to slow them down. In the dead of night, the chicken houses would be cleaned out, the occupants presumably carted off in burlap bags.

  We had a chicken house sitting high on stilts below the shack, the grounds fenced in around it. I can’t remember Dad losing any chickens, but he was adept at preventing such things. Plus we lived in a place with roads on either side of it. Stealing chickens where people could easily walk by might have been a hazard not worth taking, at least when there were easier targets available.

  We would hear of certain chicken owners who took to sleeping in or near their chicken houses but to no avail. On the night they finally couldn’t stand the stench any longer and retreated to the house, the thieves would strike. The thieves were highly coordinated in this way, which cast suspicions on the local help. Nothing could be proven though. Unless we caught someone with a stolen chicken in their hands, the locals were the most innocent people ever to walk the earth. And even caught with a bag of chickens, the offender would swear by heaven and earth that these had been raised from birth in his mother’s kitchen, where they had eaten tortilla scraps dropped from the barrel top and pecked for bugs in the grass behind the house.

  How the chicken became so fat on such sparse fare or how he climbed into the bag were matters they didn’t worry about explaining. Being innocent of the theft, such things didn’t need explaining.

  That November, tropical storm Laura passed by the northern shores of Honduras, churning warm waters before slamming into British Honduras. The high winds and rain dissipated toward the center of Guatemala and never reached us in full strength. Enough did reach us to give us a foretaste of what was to come later. Honduras sits exposed to the ocean for the full length on one side, and it is a magnet for the hurricanes that wander the Atlantic each year. There was little in the way of early warning systems back in those days.

  The highlight for me that winter was the arrival of the Gascho family from Canada. The group was led by Uncle Johnny, Mom’s older sister Martha’s husband, still known to me as Maple Syrup Johnny. They came overland by bus through Mexico. How that went, I don’t know. The occasional four-hour trip into Tegucigalpa was all I needed or wanted of third-world buses. To travel for days on end in those conditions with the whole family along was another matter entirely.

  I didn’t see the family arrive. I found out they were in the community when several of the Gascho girls showed up at the schoolhouse, led by the eldest girl, Lois. She was a bubbly, outgoing girl, as were all her sisters. Lois’s laugh was open and infectious. I don’t think she ever had a dark thought in her life. I’d never seen a family where all the females were so outgoing and all the males so meek and mild. Usually the personalities get mixed up a bit at least. So that afternoon the hillside in Honduras rang with their laugher, and I experienced one of my few pangs of homesickness.

  We all went up to Grandfather Stoll’s place that first afternoon to meet the visitors, arriving before dark to sit out under the palm trees where picnic tables and benches had been set up. There we made our full reacquaintance with the Gascho family, none of whom looked worse for wear after their long trip.

  Their eldest boy, Luke, had been a close friend in Aylmer, and we now chatted, catching up on the news. I couldn’t wait to show him our mountain. It was cloudy that afternoon, so it was useless to walk away from the orchard for a better view or we would have. I described everything with sweeping throws of my hands, already having taken in some of the local customs, including gesturing while speaking, which also helped me with my stuttering, I think. He listened with that droopy Gascho smile of his. Luke told me he’d seen the mountain on the way in. He didn’t seem as excited about it as I was, so I guess you grow to love things with perhaps a love that others can’t always see at first sight.

  We ate supper there, thoroughly enjoying ourselves before leaving for home soon after dark. The family would stay around for six weeks or so before heading back the way they’d come. I don’t remember anything spectacular happening other than just hanging around together whenever we had a chance after school and on weekends. The Gaschos took in the local culture and traveled to town, but they never uttered a word about moving down, which was something we all hoped might grow out of the visit. I guessed Uncle Johnny was staying where the maple syrup trees grew.

  Sometime after they left that winter, my strange childhood sickness began. I remember walking back toward our boys’ bedroom after supper, and having Mom stop me and feel my flushed forehead.

  “It’s just a passing flu,” she assured me.

  I felt confident I would feel better in the morning. But I didn’t, and I stayed home from school. When I stayed in bed the next day, and the next, Mom became worried. By the week’s end, we headed for the hospital in Tegucigalpa, looking for a doctor who specialized in childhood diseases.

  If I didn’t hate the bus ride already, I hated it by the time we arrived in town. Bouncing around in the dust-chocked air for four hours while burning up with a high fever is not a picnic.

  I was admitted at once and the examinations begun. X-rays were taken, and a puzzled doctor stood at my bedside. He didn’t know what was wrong. I really didn’t care one way or the other. I was too sick to care. The only emotion I could muster was irritation at the bumbling conclusions.

  My lungs were infected with something, the doctor said. But just what, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps tuberculosis (TB), he ventured. The doctor kept asking me why I constantly cleared my throat, but I had no answer. I tried to tell him without saying too many words. Nothing seemed to satisfy him. Mom offered that I had always spent a lot of time clearing my throat, mostly at regular intervals. The doctor wrinkled his brow and left. He came back again later. He seemed fascinated by my throat clearing.

  Even after more X-rays, after weeks went by, and more hospital trips, the doctor still focused on that one point. “It must be TB with that throat clearing,” he said. “Even though the other symptoms don’t exactly fit.”

  I didn’t know anything about TB, but it sounded serious enough. People die from the stuff, but no one told me I was dying. They just kept asking why I was clearing my throat.

  So I was sent home with a full regimen of medicine to treat TB. I lay in bed at home, took the stuff, and bared my behind for the daily injection of whatever I was given. There was no nurse around, and Uncle Joe couldn’t come up every day, so Mom took the task in hand. She was a good mother, but she didn’t know beans about plunging needles into the backsides of boys.

  Being bored I guess, she even invited people in for the show.

  And what was I supposed to do?

  “Hey, come in and watch Jerry get his shot.”

  Even ten-year-old boys have their modesty…or pride. Especially when you invite in boys they don’t like.

  A local boy named Porfideo was such a person. His father kept the house that had come with the Sanson farm and rested on the hill behind us. We didn’t fight, Porfideo and I. We just had an intense dislike for each other. I should have had a heart of compassion for him, I suppose, considering that we often witnessed his severe thrashings at the hand of his mother.

  Loud screams and cries would drift across the countryside, coming from the little hut on the hill. If one looked in that direction, Porfideo would soon come dashing out of the grove of trees surrounding the place pursued by his mother, who was applying whatever implement she had in her hand to his backside and screaming at the top of her voice.

  Anyway, one day Mom invited him in to watch the proceedings. On that morning I thought only of my own humiliation and not his as I bared my backside for the world to see while Mom plunged in the needle.

  All this humiliation and trauma didn’t do any good. I clearly wasn’t getting better. Mom became more and more desperate as the months went by. No diagnosis would be made by t
he Tegucigalpa doctor other than TB.

  I was missing school, and I made no attempt to catch up at home. I was too sick for that. I have clear visions of those days. I’m sitting in the outhouse behind the house in the middle of the day, knowing something was very wrong but having no idea what it was. Often a sick child will be brought what is known as a “Sunshine Box” put together by their fellow classmates or, if they’re older, by their own age group. Portions of the box are to be opened daily to prolong the pleasure.

  I had only one deep longing during those months. I wanted a Sunshine Box. I waited for weeks, sure that one was coming just as it did when my peers were seriously sick. When one didn’t come, I figured maybe it didn’t happen as often as I thought. On the other hand, I considered that this was also my own doing. One must be a good child to receive a Sunshine Box, and I wasn’t exactly anyone’s version of a good child.

  Months stretched on, and Mom brought in a foot massager, which was the latest Amish treatment going around for all things that ail you. A middle-aged woman came to visit. She rubbed pencil erasers into points on my foot. These spots were the nerves bundles, she explained to me, which stimulated healing in the attached body part. Debris and other body residue from the attached organ settled into the nerve ending in the foot, which was being dispersed by the rubbing.

  It sounded logical to me, and my feet tingled during the treatment. A pleasant enough experience overall. But whatever good it did, it didn’t affect my illness.

  In the end, I simply got better on my own after four months or so. I weakly made my way back to school again. Years later, another doctor in Tegucigalpa, and at the same hospital, looked at my X-rays during some other treatment I was undergoing and threw a royal fit. I had been diagnosed incorrectly, he told us. And unnecessarily so even if, as he claimed, this lung disease I had endured was often mistaken for TB.

  The doctor told us the disease I’d contracted came from breathing in bat or chicken manure. We cast about in our minds for a time when bats might have roosted in an attic above our heads and came up empty-handed. And we didn’t sleep under the chicken coop, so we didn’t consider the chickens possible culprits. Not even the poorest of the local poor were driven to such extremes.

  Eventually we did find the answer. We children had spent hours playing under our elevated chicken house in the midst of chicken droppings and air filled with plenty of drifting particles from the active chickens above us. Histoplasmosis, I think the disease is called—a fungus that can be fatal in acute cases. Somehow I recovered on my own.

  From then on there was no more playing under the chicken house, which didn’t do me any good. As it was, for years afterward I had lung trouble, coughing often and experiencing deep chest spasms at random intervals. And when I went swimming, I couldn’t hold my breath for any length of time. There were plenty of other things for me to do though. Fishing, floating, exploring, and camping—our place in Honduras became the center of many happy childhood hours.

  Chapter 15

  While my sickness was going on, the community continued to grow and prosper. Bishop Byler flew back in with Bishop Levi Troyer in tow this time. They had come to ordain a bishop for us. I wasn’t at the ordination and heard no talk beforehand of a preference between the three ministers: Richard, Vernon, and Monroe.

  Uncle Stephen was either not talking to the other Stolls about the liberal tendencies he was seeing in Ministers Richard and Vernon or he didn’t see them. My guess would be the former. Uncle Stephen was a man of high moral principles, and he didn’t run his mouth easily, even when he feared the worst…as he may have in this case.

  And Minister Monroe in the past year had done a good job of soothing any jittery Stoll nerves. They would have wished to know more about the leanings of the young minister. Was he liberal or conservative? I don’t know what Minister Monroe told them, but everyone loved the man, so he couldn’t have expressed anything but support for the Amish way of life.

  The community scheduled the communion service, and toward the end of the day, all the members whispered their choices to Bishop Byler and Bishop Troyer. Again Uncle Stephen was either not eligible or had recused himself.

  After the voting was finished, all three ministers had the required three votes needed and were included in the lot. Songbooks were placed on a bench in front of the church house, with one of them containing a slip of paper that would determine the new bishop. The names of Ministers Vernon, Richard, and Monroe were called out in the order from the oldest to the youngest, measured in length of ordination time as a minister.

  A short silence followed. I believe Minister Vernon went first and chose his book. Minister Richard would have gone next, and Minister Monroe took the book the other two ministers had left.

  Once Minister Monroe was seated, the books were opened, beginning again with Minister Vernon. His was empty. Next went Minister Richard. His book didn’t have the telling slip of paper either. By the time Bishop Byler opened Minister Monroe’s book, he would have known Monroe Hochstetler was to be the bishop.

  The die was cast.

  Contrary to many Amish ministers, Bishop Monroe was never shy about stating his call from God. Not his qualifications, of course, as no one was considered qualified, but he was certain of his calling.

  I’m hard-pressed to remember the words to any of his sermons, other than one in particular. I can still see Bishop Monroe standing behind that wooden pulpit, the shutters half-closed behind him, the bright streams of sunlight falling all around him. His face always looked peaceful. Speaking out of the first chapters of Revelation, where the Lord addresses the angels of the churches, Bishop Monroe said, “Just as it says here that these men were the angels placed in charge of the churches, so the Lord has placed me as the angel in charge of this church.”

  We understood he didn’t think he was a real angel, just a man placed in a holy calling. And Bishop Monroe took to his duties like a natural. He was a young man then, still in his early thirties. He hadn’t been schooled in the ways of preachers, yet he seemed to take his place with ease. Broad-shouldered and of average height, he had a soft heart for people. They instantly felt comfortable with him. People opened their hearts to him, and the road to his house was soon well traveled.

  The trail to Bishop Monroe’s place went east from the church house. We would cross old Turk Road, go past Emil Helmuth’s place, then over the ravine on a long, wooden trestle bridge without any sideboards. The little affair was only wide enough for people traffic. When driving horses or vehicles, we went further north and crossed on a concrete bridge.

  Even the locals took to stopping by, and Bishop Monroe put a lot of effort into learning Spanish. He got the accent closer than some of the others did. There were those who fought hard with the roll of the R’s, some with more success than the others. Mom’s Cousin Ira was among the worst. I don’t think the poor man ever got it right, though he tried his best. Bishop Monroe could soon converse at length about Scripture and spiritual matters in the Spanish tongue. And preach, of course, which produced another problem. How much of the services should be in Spanish instead of the usual German?

  Bishop Monroe looked out over the crowded church house on Sunday mornings, and more often than not found reasons to preach in Spanish. Ministers Richard and Vernon followed his example. It was the natural pull of things, a result that had been warned against by the Amish bishops up north. They’d said we couldn’t resist the pull of the culture once we began to evangelize.

  In Bishop Monroe’s conversations with the locals, a subject much in demand was the matter of nonresistance, especially with all the petty thievery going on. The locals shook their heads at the “stupidity” of these Amish folks who didn’t believe in shooting people. Why not just use the guns some of the Amish have stacked in their closets for hunting? the locals asked. Wouldn’t a few shots fired in the air during the nighttime do much to discourage the chicken thieves? Not to mention a few threats dropped discreetly in town.

&
nbsp; One of the locals broached the subject with Bishop Monroe one evening. I wasn’t there, but I was told about the conversation.

  “So why is it that you Amish people let people steal from you?” the man asked.

  I can see Bishop Monroe putting on his patient look. “We don’t let people steal from us. That’s in God’s hands. We trust in Him, and take what measures we can. See over there? I lock my barn where the tools are, and at night we lock the house. It’s not right for people to steal, and we would be encouraging theft by leaving everything open. But we cannot kill anyone for stealing from us. Killing belongs only to God.”

  “But a little bullet here and there does much to help without hurting them,” the man replied. “I know because I have lived here for a long time, and that’s the way it is. Our people grow up like this. Our fathers and our mothers, they all steal when they can. Only from family we don’t steal. The uneducated mountain people who know nothing, they steal from their families. But we will steal from the others if there is opportunity and we will not get hurt. Why not take it? That is what my father said.”

  Bishop Monroe would have kept his patient look as he tried to explain. “This is, of course, all wrong, even if your father said it. We should not steal from each other. Not even if they are not family.”

  “Well, of course you say so,” the man shot back. “You are rich. We are poor and have to live by stealing.”

  “There have been times in my life when I have been poor,” Bishop Monroe would have assured him. “And it’s not that I’m that rich now. But I have found nothing is gained by stealing. Stealing teaches the wrong lessons about life. It teaches us to leave God out of our everyday needs. God wants us to earn our money and possessions by working. It takes faith in God when men or women look to work as their hope for improving their life. Maybe it may not seem to you like it does, but it does.”