By Sara Talpos
The Allegheny Plateau, sprawling across northern Pennsylvania and beyond, is an ecosystem of forested hills, with land that supports black bears, bald eagles and wandering turkeys, as well as a patchwork of wild herbs: burdock, jewelweed, chamomile and sheep sorrel. Cellphone reception is spotty and gas stations are few and far between. Tucked away among the streams branching from the Cowanesque river is a cluster of small white and tan buildings, including the office of John Keim, an Amish elder and community healer.
In the 1980s, Keim’s young son was scalded by a pot of boiling water, burning off his skin from collarbone to waist. Hospital care was out of the question. Previously, two of Keim’s cousins had been burned in a fire and spent three months in an Indiana hospital. Every week, relatives had sent letters describing how the children screamed as their wounds were cleaned and their bandages changed. Reflecting on that, Keim says, “I just felt it was so inhumane. I would not ever take a child to a burn unit.” He wanted to be autonomous of what he viewed as a brutal system.
Keim and his wife treated their son at home. Initially, they applied a salve of herbs and wrapped the wounds with gauze, but the gauze sunk into the boy’s flesh. They needed a dressing that wouldn’t stick.
In his book Comfort for the Burned and Wounded Keim writes, “I thought of how God created the Earth. I honestly felt He kept the poor in mind while Earth was being created.” He tried to think of things in nature that might help a poor person treat burns. Hitting upon waxy plantain leaves, he gathered a hatful from a nearby field, scalded them so they would be pliable, and used them to wrap his son’s wounds with a layer of herbal salve. Within five days, new skin covered the boy’s body. He had survived.
When you think of the Amish, you don’t necessarily think solar panels, but here they are – six of them − on the roof of a horse barn in Holmes County, Ohio, home to the world’s largest Amish settlement. The barn, and the office above it, belong to Marvin Wengerd, who is Amish and serves as a liaison between his community and their non-Amish healthcare providers.
“If you ask the average Amishman on the street, ‘Why don’t you have electricity?’” says Wengerd, “he would say something like, ‘It connects me to the larger world and makes me dependent on the larger world in ways that I find troubling.’” Many further object to television and the internet because they promote vanity and sexual impurities, rather than Biblical values. For his part, Wengerd uses electricity in a limited capacity – for example, to power his office lights and phone. But thanks to the solar panels, which feed a battery, he’s off the grid, not dependent on the government or the oil industry for power
The Amish and other groups such as Old Order Mennonites refer to themselves as “Plain” because they choose to live a modest lifestyle centred on their faith and separated from the rest of the world. There is some diversity between Plain groups, as each community creates its own rules for everything from clothing to technology use. In general, though, Plain people complete formal education in eighth grade (aged 14), use horse and carriage for daily travel, reject mains electricity, and interact with outsiders in a limited capacity. In most Plain communities, individual families and businesses sell furniture, produce or handmade quilts to the wider population, whom they turn to for services such as banking and emergency taxi rides.
The biggest and most complicated cultural intersection is the modern health care system. Plain people often advocate for more freedom in deciding when to go to a hospital, how to get there, and what interventions will be used. In short, they want greater autonomy.
The full story in yahoo news.
The Allegheny Plateau, sprawling across northern Pennsylvania and beyond, is an ecosystem of forested hills, with land that supports black bears, bald eagles and wandering turkeys, as well as a patchwork of wild herbs: burdock, jewelweed, chamomile and sheep sorrel. Cellphone reception is spotty and gas stations are few and far between. Tucked away among the streams branching from the Cowanesque river is a cluster of small white and tan buildings, including the office of John Keim, an Amish elder and community healer.
In the 1980s, Keim’s young son was scalded by a pot of boiling water, burning off his skin from collarbone to waist. Hospital care was out of the question. Previously, two of Keim’s cousins had been burned in a fire and spent three months in an Indiana hospital. Every week, relatives had sent letters describing how the children screamed as their wounds were cleaned and their bandages changed. Reflecting on that, Keim says, “I just felt it was so inhumane. I would not ever take a child to a burn unit.” He wanted to be autonomous of what he viewed as a brutal system.
Keim and his wife treated their son at home. Initially, they applied a salve of herbs and wrapped the wounds with gauze, but the gauze sunk into the boy’s flesh. They needed a dressing that wouldn’t stick.
In his book Comfort for the Burned and Wounded Keim writes, “I thought of how God created the Earth. I honestly felt He kept the poor in mind while Earth was being created.” He tried to think of things in nature that might help a poor person treat burns. Hitting upon waxy plantain leaves, he gathered a hatful from a nearby field, scalded them so they would be pliable, and used them to wrap his son’s wounds with a layer of herbal salve. Within five days, new skin covered the boy’s body. He had survived.
When you think of the Amish, you don’t necessarily think solar panels, but here they are – six of them − on the roof of a horse barn in Holmes County, Ohio, home to the world’s largest Amish settlement. The barn, and the office above it, belong to Marvin Wengerd, who is Amish and serves as a liaison between his community and their non-Amish healthcare providers.
“If you ask the average Amishman on the street, ‘Why don’t you have electricity?’” says Wengerd, “he would say something like, ‘It connects me to the larger world and makes me dependent on the larger world in ways that I find troubling.’” Many further object to television and the internet because they promote vanity and sexual impurities, rather than Biblical values. For his part, Wengerd uses electricity in a limited capacity – for example, to power his office lights and phone. But thanks to the solar panels, which feed a battery, he’s off the grid, not dependent on the government or the oil industry for power
The Amish and other groups such as Old Order Mennonites refer to themselves as “Plain” because they choose to live a modest lifestyle centred on their faith and separated from the rest of the world. There is some diversity between Plain groups, as each community creates its own rules for everything from clothing to technology use. In general, though, Plain people complete formal education in eighth grade (aged 14), use horse and carriage for daily travel, reject mains electricity, and interact with outsiders in a limited capacity. In most Plain communities, individual families and businesses sell furniture, produce or handmade quilts to the wider population, whom they turn to for services such as banking and emergency taxi rides.
The biggest and most complicated cultural intersection is the modern health care system. Plain people often advocate for more freedom in deciding when to go to a hospital, how to get there, and what interventions will be used. In short, they want greater autonomy.
The full story in yahoo news.
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