My Amish Childhood

by Jerry S. Eicher

  We headed south toward Texas, staying on the back roads at Neil’s insistence. He said he could drive the same speed as the interstates, which was fifty-five miles per hour that year by virtue of a law passed by Congress in March to deal with the oil crisis and save on national fuel consumption.

  We seemed to crawl toward Honduras. I think the real reason Neil liked the back way was for the scenery. He would stop and snap away with his camera at every pleasant view—and at us. I think we were the most photographed Amish family around that year. Dad probably figured it was useless to object; besides, Neil was his friend.

  It’s strange what you remember on such trips. For me it was the Dutch Pantry restaurants. Every evening we stopped there for supper at Neil and Carol’s insistence. We ate only two meals a day, one late morning and at the Dutch Pantry around six. From there we would find a cheap motel and settle in for the night.

  Mrs. Wright, Eicher kids, and Dad.

  We hadn’t gone too many days until it became obvious the trailer had serious problems with its tires. They simply wouldn’t stand up to the sustained use, along with the heavy weight of what we were hauling back down. Every day or so a tire would blow. Neil and Dad would jack up the axle on some lonely road, remove the wheel, flag down a passing car, and hitch a ride into town while we all waited. Waiting each day for the next blowout drove both of them to severe states of mental distraction. Clearly something would have to be done. They tried buying new tires, but those didn’t hold up any better than the old ones.

  I didn’t mind. From my spot lying on my side with my two smaller brothers in the luggage compartment, stopping was actually better than going.

  John, the mischief maker, constantly made trouble up front for Carol, and there would be occasional temper flares. Carol said he wiggled. She claimed John punched her with his knee. They threatened to send him back with us, which kept things under control better than anything else did.

  Carol played gospel tapes on those long miles. Endless loops of the same cassettes. Those songs played in my head for years afterward.

  We finally crossed the border into Mexico, and my heart warmed at the sight. Gone in one mile was the sterile landscape, the lack of color, the order, the cleanness. Home was calling. I stared out the station wagon window at the confusion in the streets. Bicycles and donkeys mixed in with the cars. People were going everywhere. Huts sat haphazardly, dressed in their pastel pinks and yellows, oranges and greens paint jobs. Filth was thrown along the sidewalk, something I suppose only a homesick child could find beautiful. It stirred the deepest depths of my soul. A primordial emotion, I suspect, from before our race was civilized. Soldiers stood along the streets at checkpoints, waving us on without checking our papers. We were already back in favored gringos status.

  We passed glimpses of the Gulf of Mexico, seen through the station wagon windows. Neil looked nervous as he clutched the steering wheel. We’d crossed the border late in the afternoon and were now out in the countryside. Dad didn’t like traveling after dark, but we kept going. Neil felt the need to try for the next town. Showing his bravery, I suppose, which fled when headlights bounced around behind us, keeping pace with the station wagon.

  “Do you think they’re following us?” Neil asked Dad.

  “I don’t think so,” Dad assured him.

  “But they are!” Neil declared moments later.

  He floored the accelerator, and we sped off into the night going more than ninety on the winding, unknown, rut-filled roads. Silence hung heavy in the car as the lights behind us kept pace.

  Dad didn’t say anything about slowing down. As we rocked into the next town, the lights behind us vanished. Neil wiped his brow and vowed to travel no more after dark. We were all thankful nothing worse had happened, so we refrained from caustic remarks. Even Carol kept her mouth shut as we found a motel and settled in.

  The place we were at had a local band playing that evening. The music was in Spanish, of course. I crept out in the hallway to listen. The halls were full of cheerful, bouncy, soulish sounds. I couldn’t believe my ears when music burst forth from Mom and Dad’s room behind me. I snuck back for a look, peering inside the door. Dad was playing a mouth organ, keeping fairly good time with the sounds out in the hallway. I had no idea Dad played anything. Or that harmonicas were allowed by the Amish. I stared in disbelief. Had the world come to an end? Mom saw me and motioned me in. She explained that harmonicas were perfectly acceptable to most Amish people, and Dad had known how to play since his youth, all of which was news to me. I listened for a long time, enthralled. He was good. As good as the men outside. Apparently the trip north had brought back old memories for Dad. I have no idea, though, when or where in our travels he’d purchased the musical instrument.

  We headed out again the next morning. Soon the continued trailer tire blowout stress finally came to a head. Dad and Neil had enough of it. They stopped at a machine shop and purchased a whole new set of tires. By the way they chuckled and laughed to each other when they came back, I knew something was up. Turns out they’d found tires stronger and better than anything sold stateside—something to do with government regulations.

  We waited for most of the forenoon as the tires were installed third-world fashion—very slowly. Mom told us children Bible stories out beside the car. Stories I didn’t even know existed, let alone that such stories could be in the Bible. She told the story of how Lot’s two daughters kept their family lines afloat by intoxicating their own father and then sleeping with him. I listened in sheer horror.

  Perhaps Mom thought it was time to begin the family’s education in such matters, and that now was the moment. Or perhaps she was spurred on by her knowledge of the sexual mores that surrounded us daily in Honduras. Whatever the reasons, she wouldn’t have had to worry. She did a good job with all her children. We turned out a fairly decent bunch.

  With the new tires on, we climbed back into the station wagon and headed out. Our trailer tire troubles were finally over! No more blowouts from there to home.

  Hanging to the coast, we drove through Veracruz, and then across Mexico to pick up the Pan-American Highway. The Continental Divide runs through there, with beautiful high mountains. The land felt as isolated as anywhere I’ve been.

  I watched out the back windows as Neil snapped away with his camera. He was taking pictures even while he was driving. Carol kept yelling at him, but Neil couldn’t resist the temptation. Somewhere in those mountains he pushed things too far. A group of native women chased the station wagon with rage on their faces after Neil slowed down to snap their picture.

  Later, approaching a ravine, Neil stopped to capture the view. A native hut was sitting on the ridge with the valley below. It was breathtaking, and Neil snapped away, only to be interrupted by the wrathful hut owner who came bolting out, waving some kind of primitive weapon. Neil laughed as he sped off, but he stopped taking pictures for awhile.

  In Guatemala, the mountains continued. When we entered Guatemala City, we got lost. Neil drove aimlessly around with the town spread out below us. Eventually Dad and Neil straightened things out, and we were on the right road again.

  San Salvador wasn’t much to see, but then the high mountains of Mexico and Guatemala are hard to compete with.

  At the Honduras border we ran into our first problem with customs officials. Before that, Dad had been giving out apples from his stash in the trailer, and everyone had been happy to wave us on through.

  “Duty,” the officials said now. “It has to be paid.”

  “These are our own possessions,” Dad explained to no avail.

  We waited for hours on the Honduras side while negations proceeded. Officials would come by, rummage through the trailer’s contents and leave again. I don’t know how things were finally settled, but likely with the paying of some fee. Bribery really, but that goes without saying in that part of the world. You pay the small upfront fee and slip a little more under the paper to have it processed right away. And perh
aps some more is slipped into a hand so the official who needs to sign off can be found today instead of tomorrow.

  We drove on, happy as larks that our trip was finally close to over. Tegucigalpa looked different coming in from the Salvador side. Neil laughed at our horror stories of the four-hour bus trips to Guaimaca. Just another opportunity to snap pictures, he figured. He wasn’t laughing by the time it was over. We pulled into the familiar valley after bouncing around in the station wagon for four hours. Even Neil was thankful to finally arrive.

  I jumped out and made a beeline for Fausto’s shack to see our dog, Jumper, and all things familiar. I announced my presence by hollering, “Aquí estamos!” [“Here we are!”] as I came around the edge of the shack at a dead run. Elsa grinned from ear to ear, but Jumper wasn’t happy to see me at all. She groveled around on the dirt for awhile and growled at me.

  “Se le ha olvidado” [“She has forgotten you”], Elsa said, all sympathetic. It didn’t take long before things were back to what they used to be. Jumper followed us back to the house. We were home!

  Neil and Carol hung around for a week or so and then headed north again.

  Chapter 34

  Soon after we arrived home, Hurricane Fifi struck the northern coastline of Honduras, drenching us all night with rain. The next morning torrents of water were running down the lane between David Peachey’s house and the children’s home. I thought nothing of it, thinking it just another hard-hitting nighttime storm. But news soon poured in, telling us otherwise. Unbeknownst to us, Hurricane Carmen had passed north of Honduras with its 150-mile-an-hour winds early that September—probably about the time we were traveling through Mexico, but it did little harm by the time it made landfall. Following right on Carmen’s heels not two weeks later, Fifi struck, traveling lower in the Gulf this time. A weaker storm with its 110-mile-an-hour winds, it was the one that did the most damage. After raking most of the northern Honduras coast, the hurricane continued on across Guatemala and Mexico, passing close to the route we’d just come home on. When it reached land, it quickly became a tropical storm.

  Honduras had little in the way of an early warning system back then. Locals in their huts had only the signs they knew to look for to prepare them before the storm smashed down. Estimates of the dead came close to 10,000—but those were Honduran figures, and thus open to question. One coastal town was reported to have been nearly wiped out.

  The Amish community was quickly galvanized into action. Men were dispatched to Guaimaca to obtain passes needed to enter the afflicted areas. Contact was made with the Mennonite Relief Agency in the capital city. They reported that headquarters was sending down a man to survey the damage, and they would begin addressing the immediate need of housing people.

  Letters to The Budget were written and mailed.

  The little town of Choloma, population 10,000 before the hurricane, lies north of San Pedro Sula. It received the bulk of our Amish attention. Parties from the community left at regular intervals to shovel mud, at first, and then to rebuild the houses.

  The papers in the capital implored the nations of the world for aid, and it did pour in. Shipments of not just food, but items of all description. All those donations, however, didn’t end up as hurricane relief. In Honduras, aid seems to reach those who need it the least. This became a joke in the local community. All the strange items the locals showed up with to offer for sale to the gringos included things like small hand files, which we could use, especially at Dad’s shop. We were miles from the coastal damage, so how the donated merchandise reached us was a stretch for even our imaginations that were accustomed to third-world corruption. It must have flowed through many hands, with each getting their dip.

  In the meantime, only the adults were going to work at Choloma, as the area was considered too dangerous for children. Later a chaperoned load of schoolchildren was taken in on a chartered bus. For a long time we’d heard of the hurricane’s terrible aftermath from the returning adults, so we greatly wanted to see this for ourselves.

  There was little to see since most of the debris and damaged homes had been cleaned up by then. We could see some of the marks though. Honduras is a hilly country, consisting at times of land that goes up one hill and down the other. Near the foothills of San Pedro Sula, on all sides, were long brown marks running up and down them, like great claw marks of a wild beast trying to scale the heights.

  Any hut caught in those landslides wouldn’t have stood a chance. But it was the storm surge coming in from the ocean, we were told, and the flooding, that had done most of the damage.

  Once we arrived, the chaperones gave us a tour of the building projects. We got to see where Minister Richard, as well as Bishop Monroe, had held church services. Enough monies had come in from The Budget write-ups to run a full-time, on-site Amish outreach program. Even Pathway’s Family Life ran a short notice soliciting funds, all of which came directly from the Amish community in Canada and the States in checks they mailed down.

  That night we slept on blankets laid out on the concrete floor in a municipal building.

  Because of the publicity associated with the Amish community’s involvement at Choloma, a government official representing aid outreach in Honduras arrived in the community with a bold proposal. The government would manufacture a horse-drawn plow, made right in Honduras. Then the Amish could teach the locals how to run the thing.

  It would have seemed to me like Grandfather Stoll’s dream come true. It was the fruition of his dream all those years ago. That of taking Amish farming ingenuity from a land where it really wasn’t needed to a third-world country where it could produce maximum results.

  The aid official had access to the highest levels of the national government, he claimed. And he was committed to the project. The prototype of the new plow was already made and ready for testing. Would the Amish try it out and give their expert opinion on the matter? Would they eventually supply multiple Amish men as trainers who would travel the countryside giving demonstrations and instructing the natives in this much superior use of horse plowing? It would certainly be better than the only option they now had—their oxen.

  Amish recalcitrance set in at once. The decision for some reason fell to Uncle Joe, who was having none of it at first. This was the government, and no Amish person consorted with the government. I’m sure the liberal wing of the community would have loved the chance to hobnob with high-government officials, but those Amish either didn’t like horse farming or didn’t care to learn. Probably the former, since they’d already had their sights set on the mystical dream of tractor farming.

  Honduran farmer plowing with oxen.

  So things were thrown Uncle Joe’s way. He relented a little. They would test the government’s prototype and give their opinion. The official was overjoyed with even this offer, and he showed up on the appointed day with his plow. I’m sure Uncle Joe offered his definite opinion about the benefits of using local horses over the Belgians and Percherons brought in from stateside.

  The prototype, under the skilled hands of Uncle Joe and his eldest son, Paul, proved fatally flawed. It was flimsy, and its nose dug into the ground. The government official wasn’t discouraged. He would fix the plow in time for the big demonstration in the capital.

  There important government officials would be in attendance and a final decision could be made. Would Uncle Joe send his team and an operator for the big day? All expenses paid, of course.

  Again Uncle Joe relented. But that would be the end of it, he said.

  Once the big day of the demonstration arrived, ox plowing was displayed alongside Uncle Joe’s team of native horses and the new plow. Careful measurements were made of the furrows and the time taken. Officials muttered to each other, and everyone went home.

  A few days later the original aid official returned to the community with a report of tremendous success. The government had approved the new plow and wished to proceed with the program. Could he hire on Amish boys or men to travel t
he countryside teaching the locals? All expenses paid, plus a wage four times what a local laborer made.

  Uncle Joe said no. Things had gone far enough. He might do one more demonstration, but that was it.

  The significance of Uncle Stephen’s leaving had not gone unnoticed by Uncle Joe. He’d mourned often the departure of his brother, but he had soldiered on bravely. Up until now. This withdrawal was the end of the road, following so close to the great success of the Amish helping at Choloma.

  So if Uncle Stephen was where the canary died, then Uncle Joe was where we lost our heart. The vision Grandfather Stoll had for the Honduras community was now ready to die. There remained only the details of how the long trek back home would occur.

  Perhaps Bishop Monroe could yet have turned the tide if he’d known what to do. He didn’t lack in enthusiasm, but he failed to grasp the gravity of the situation.

  On the surface things were still going along quite well. The success with the Choloma project had invigorated everyone and seemed to solidify the role the Amish could play even in major national disasters.

  School started again that fall. It was eighth grade, and thus my final year of formal education, according to Amish culture.

  In February 1975, Uncle John Martin, who was married to my Aunt Sarah, placed the last touches on his new invention. Over near the creek by Grandmother Stoll’s place, a puffed wheat popping machine began operation, looking like a cannon used in Civil War times. Uncle John set the thing on the upper floor of a shack, put in the wheat and heated up the cannon. When the proper temperature was reached, the whole contraption was thrown downward toward a chute leading to the lower level and the door flipped open by some trigger switch.