Posted on 09/09/2006 3:19:07 PM PDT by DaveLoneRanger
Off the side of a dirt road in southern Maryland stands an odd answer to the swiftly changing telecommunications industry.
It's a rusted metal chamber, nearly 8 feet tall. The door is padlocked. Trees surround it, with no houses in sight. It looks like an old bomb shelter.
Inside is a telephone. Built by several nearby Mennonite families, the oil tank-turned-phone booth connects them to the rest of the world. Sort of.
And "sort of" is the point when it comes to the estimated 1,600 Old Order Mennonite and Amish residents who still ride horse-drawn buggies down the roads of St. Mary's County.
In the last several years, they have erected at least 12 similarly hidden private phone booths, posting them behind barns, in the woods and in one case, inside a former chicken coop.
The phones allow them to conduct business while holding on to prohibitions against home phone lines and cell phones. Called "community phones," they are the latest example of how the groups have been cutting deals with technology for the past century.
Old Order Mennonite and Amish families in St. Mary's once relied on public pay phones. But as people migrated to cell phones, telecommunications companies removed pay phones. So the Amish and Mennonites are adapting.
Monthly bills are divided among the families, who can't post phones too close to homes. Nor can they can outfit them with amplified ringers that effectively would make them house phones. The idea is to limit forces deemed a distraction from faith and family.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
By the way, if the door is padlocked, who has the key?
Hmm, be interestedin finding out why.
(I have no connection to the Amish in any way, just have been fascinatesd by their lafestyle)
Ping!
;-)
It isn't that they find technology inherently evil. But at the same time they don't want to walk around with a phone affixed to their ears at all times like many Americans do ("I'm getting in an elevator now!").
They draw a line but are willing to make adjustments.
Also the teens interact with the "modern" (or what they call English) world for a couple years (generally to the excess of the worst things the current generation of MTV has to offer) and then voluntarily return to the community.
As generations change, there may be more technology brought in under the wire.
But times are changin...I'm a couple miles at most from many Menonite families...Michigan...
They still don't drive vehicles...They do however hire people to cart them around in vans...
They do use electricity and many have cell phones...
They own a grocery store not far from me, and a bakery...And they have the nicest 'old' farmhouses...
I'm told a lot of the retired ones go to a Menonite village in Florida in the winter months...
Much as their lifestyle of simplicity sounds really appealling at times, I always thought their tendency to bend the rules was strange. It just didn't seem consistent to forbid stuff like cars and phones from personal ownership, yet be willing to use them anyway. If they're wrong, they're wrong.
Thank you, English. You're very plain. I've always said this.
I couldn't resist! ;-)
I don't think the issue is that they're "wrong," it's that they distract from God and family. Which is true. I should be cleaning my God-given home and spending time with my wonderful husband, but I'm on the computer and he's tinkering with remote control airplanes. If I wasn't on the computer, I could be watching TV, talking on the phone, listening to CDs ... not that any of these things are inherently evil or bad, in fact, they are great tools when used properly, but it is very easy to use them improperly and excessively. I think this is what the Amish and Mennonites are guarding against.
I keep thinking of the Douglas's phone on Green Acres; you had to climb the telephone pole to use it.
CC&E
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