Here is a feature article in the Washington Post that some might find fiddly and boring, but I found fascinating. It gives a great insight into Mennonite and Amish thinking. These groups continue to prosper as they stick with their traditional ways.
Still Called by Faith To the Phone Booth
It used to be that Old Order Mennonite and Amish families in St. Mary’s relied on public, coin-operated pay phones. But as people migrated to cellphones, telecommunications companies took notice. On average, they remove more than 1,000 pay phones a year in Maryland, according to state records. Verizon, for example, plans to take out two pay phones along heavily-Amish Thompson Corner and Budds Creek roads in St. Mary’s.
So the Amish and Mennonites are adapting.
"Business is business," said Elmer Brubacher, a Mennonite standing over a pallet of tomatoes at the Loveville Produce Auction that he helps run. "If they have to pull them out, I understand that."
The new phones hold advantages. The Amish and Mennonites don’t have to carry around fistfuls of quarters or buy costly calling cards. Families divide monthly bills. Because the phones are hidden, locked and — in the case of a metal chamber booth, which was fashioned out of a tank salvaged from a junkyard — reinforced, the phones are less likely to attract vandals and drug dealers.
There are rules. Families can’t post phones too close to homes, and they can’t outfit them with amplified ringers that effectively would make them house phones. Some Amish don’t cotton to voice mail, but Old Order Mennonites seem more accepting of the feature. For both groups, the idea is to limit forces they think will distract them from faith and family.
"The telephone, and the use of the telephone, is not something we’re opposed to. We just don’t want it to be the main part of our lives," said Ethan Brubacher, 31, a nephew of Elmer, who owns Quiet Valley Structures, a shed-building business in Loveville. He and 11 neighbors share a community phone booth that is screened off by a row of 20 evergreen hedges
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