Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy by Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, David L. Weaver-Zercher Read Free Book Online

after the shooting. Fire company volunteers and neighbors served thousands of meals at the firehouse, feeding some five hundred people a day for most of the week. Local stores contributed food and drinks for the hungry volunteers.
     
    The Bart Post Office received thousands of cards, letters, checks, and gifts from around the world. Some letters arrived with only a simple address: “Amish Families of Nickel Mines, USA.” For four weeks, volunteers came to the firehouse five days a week and sorted the mail into large plastic tubs. Each tub had a label: the name of a particular Amish family, “the Roberts family,” or “the Amish.” One Amish family received about twenty-five hundred letters. By mid-November, as the mail began to dwindle, the sorters came in only three days a week. An entire office at the firehouse overflowed with teddy bears—hundreds more than the surviving children could use. The extra teddy bears and other toys eventually found their way to children in other Amish schools.
     
    The care demonstrated by their English neighbors made a deep impression on the Amish. “I can’t put into words what the people are doing for our community,” wrote a Georgetown correspondent in Die Botschaft. 2 “The police tried to keep the newsmen away. Fire companies and ambulance people were here from far around. Almost all the roads were closed around here almost all last week to keep the tourists and the newsmen away.” He continued, “Words can’t express what the English are doing for our people. We’re getting cards and letters from all over the world. A lot of people gathered at the firehouse…. Some were neighbors and others were total strangers.”
     
    Indeed, outsiders who wondered if the tragedy would drive a wedge between the Amish and the English needed only to look inside the firehouse: Amish and state police officers worked side by side; Amish and non-Amish women prepared and served meals together. As a result, the cultural barriers between the Amish and the English diminished somewhat in the wake of the shooting. Everyone, both Amish and English, agreed that the incident drew them closer together. “We were all Amish this week,” said one Amish man.
     
    The Amish also received support from more distant places. On impulse, several out-of-state grief counselors boarded a plane for Pennsylvania, hoping to help the grieving families. Philadelphia residents offered housing to Amish families so they could stay near their hospitalized children. A manufacturer of playground equipment pledged to donate all the outside equipment for a new Amish school. Some outsiders, demonstrating a remarkable degree of sensitivity, inquired whether their gifts would be culturally appropriate. Students and teachers at an elementary school in Florida who were preparing a box of school supplies for the surviving children asked whether they could include a globe, crayons, and coloring books, or whether such items might be offensive. Their gifts, in fact, fit the culture perfectly.
     
    Some of the goodwill came in response to previous acts of grace. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, fifty Amish carpenters went to Picayune, Mississippi, to repair the roofs of hurricane-damaged homes. When the residents of Picayune heard about the school shooting, they wanted to return the favor. Despite their ongoing struggle to recover from Katrina, the people of Picayune presented the Amish community with a check for $11,000. Some expressions of care had even deeper roots. In 1972, after the destructive floods of Hurricane Agnes, Amish people helped to clean up the mud and mess in devastated areas of central Pennsylvania. Thirty-four years later, people in several of those communities called and asked what they could do to return the kindness.
     
    Hundreds of phone calls flooded the Bart Township Fire Company, from people asking how to help and where to send money. The Georgetown branch of the Coatesville Savings