Growing Up Amish

Growing Up Amish in the News !

"Growing up Amish" author Anna Olson talks about the Amish culture:
Part 1 by Karin L. Nauber

Editor's Note: This is the first of three parts in a series of articles on "Growing Up Amish: The Insider Secrets" author Anna Olson who left the Amish community and way of life 15 years ago.
The Amish have long been a mystery to us "English."

A quiet group of people whose seemingly "backward" ways have amazed and perhaps even amused people who are not familiar with the culture.

Anna Dee (Miller) Olson is a woman who now lives in New York Mills and works as an engineering technician for HomeCrest in Wadena managing databases.

This is pretty odd when you consider that 15 years ago Anna was just leaving her Amish lifestyle and had not really operated equipment of a technological sort.

Today, it is like a dream come true for Anna who said she often imagined a life outside of the Amish community.

But it wasn't easy.

"It was the most difficult decision of my life," said Anna as we sat together in the busy Uptown Restaurant in Wadena and talked about what life had been like growing up Amish.
Anna grew up in the Amish community between Bertha and Hewitt. It was a typical home with no electricity, no warm running water and no indoor bathroom facilities.

No electricity meant no flipping on a wall switch and having instant light. It also meant no television or computer, two amenities that most modern day folks would go "crazy" without.
Being Amish also meant no motorized vehicles, like a car.

They did have discipline and a strictness which Anna said was "taken to an extreme level in my home. There was little or no explanation as to why the rules were in place," she said.
In one of her chapter overviews for her book she wrote, "Community isolation coupled with a rule set that bordered on vindictive taught me to re-think how I would raise my own children. I always knew that I did not want to run my home the same way."

Part of that was not being hugged. In Anna's family, hugging was not the general way to show affection.

"And to this day, my father has never told me that he loved me. We were just supposed to know that he did," she said.

Like most teenagers, though, Anna said that she and her friends did do things to defy the rules.
One of those things was smoking, drinking and playing a radio when the teenagers got together.
Anna also purchased a camera at a store and took pictures of most of her siblings. She also had pictures of herself taken.

"People ask me how I got the camera," she said with a laugh. "I bought it at a store just like everyone else does."

Anna is the fifth of 10 children. Six of the ten have now left the Amish culture. Anna doesn't speak for them or their decision to leave the culture, only of her own decision, what lead up to it and where she is now. She does tell me, though, that her youngest sister Ella and her husband just left the community a couple of months ago and now live in Montana.

From an interview that Anna gave to the Wadena Pioneer Journal in 1995, Anna said that her siblings, who were still at home, were curious about her new life but that she had no intention of persuading others to follow her.

"I'm never going to do that. I will not influence my brothers and sisters or anyone in the community because I think they have to make their own decisions. I had to make mine. Nobody influenced me as far as trying to talk me into it and I will not talk anyone else into it," she said in the interview.

She still feels that way today.

Anna grew up in an Old Order Amish community.

"The Old Order Amish are distinguished from the Beachy Amish and the New Order Amish by their strict adherence to the use of horses for farming and transportation, their traditional manner of dress and their refusal to allow electricity or telephones in their homes. The Old Order Amish is the concept many outsiders have when they think of 'Amish.'

"The Amish movement takes its name from that of Jacob Amman, a Swiss-German Mennonite leader. Amman believed the Mennonites were drifting away from the original teachings. Amman insisted upon the practice of shunning excluded members. This strict literalism led to the establishment of the Amish. Because the Amish are the result of a division with the Mennonites, some consider the Amish a conservative Mennonite group.

"The geographic and social isolation of Amish communities makes it difficult to determine their total population. In 2000, there were 198,000 Old Order Amish in the United States, according to calculations based on the number of church districts and average district size.

According to sociologist Julia Erickson, of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Amish are among the fastest growing populations in the world." Source: Wikipedia, online encyclopedia.

Watch for part two of growing up Amish in next week's issue of the Independent News Herald. Anna will tell about some things that led up to her decision to leave the Amish culture, what life is like for her now and a question and answer session on the Amish culture.

For a closer look at what’s in her book, go to www.growingupamish.com