Amish hamlet despairs over lost innocence
Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, is barely a town – a country crossing is more like it.
Not much to it, really, except for a Thursday-night auction hall, a spring-fed swimming pool and a few homes framed by cornfields.
But those who live atop the little rise here have always felt a strong sense of place.
Until yesterday, when gunfire shattered their solitude, this was a place, they say, that danced with children’s voices.
“You could hear them laughing, shouting, playing baseball,” Ron Doutrich recalled, digging his hands into his jeans and gazing out across the road, to where the steeple of a little Amish school peeks over the cornstalks.
“It’s innocence lost,” said Jim Davis, a pastor at nearby Calvary Monument Bible Church. “Wherever people are, evil can reside.”
The area, with its horses-and-buggies and women in bonnets, seems to have preserved a sense of gentleness, so easily submerged in the coarseness of modern life.
To some extent, says Doutrich, who has lived among the Amish his whole life, all is not as ideal as it might seem. People here have problems, too.
But each time he watches the Amish working together to erect barns and schools, he appreciates the community they have forged, he said.
The little school seemed to embody much of what people appreciate about their way of life here.
It is a simple place, a tiny cinderblock structure, plain as could be.
But the children who reached it on scooters and by walking through the fields were as animated and curious as their parents were stoic.
Doutrich recalls that about 10 days ago, a hot air balloon landed in the field across from his house.
Within minutes, nearly 50 people – nearly all of them children – had gathered around, laughing and pointing.
Yesterday the classroom down the hill was silent, and the schoolyard filled with police cars. Four news helicopters hovered overhead.
Doutrich is sure it cannot stay that way.
The Amish are resilient, he says, and will move past the school shooting by telling themselves it was God’s will. But Davis is not so sure.
People, of whatever faith, are bound to question how such a terrible thing could have befallen this hamlet and its people. And the answers, he says, will not be easy to come by.
“I think the basic question people are asking right now is, God, why have you forsaken us?” said Davis, whose church opened its doors last night to offer counselling to those who are grieving. “What we have to do is allow people to ask the question.”
