News from The Budget

Photo: Mary Swander

In these days of digital newspapers, I find The Budget delivers a comforting, hefty thump when it lands in my rural mailbox. The Budget, published since 1890 out of Sugarcreek, Ohio, brings 50 to 60 paper pages of news from every Anabaptist community in the world, including Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren. It boasts 50,000 Readers each week in Plain Communities across the Americas.  The “scribe” of every community reports the weather, the comings and goings, the births and deaths, and the illnesses and recoveries of their group—plus any other anecdotes that might resonate with these far-flung readers.

With the news comes inserts advertising everything from harmonicas to wellness centers where brain scanning, rife scanning, and microscrope blood analysis is offered. Individual ads hawk the necessities of Amish life: horseshoes, hoop house covers, trampoline parts, and pain-relief supplements. And yet another section includes feature stories and national news—the opening of an Amish quilt show at the Smithsonian Institute, volunteer work drilling wells in Haiti, and lectures on the odyssey of some Mennonites who fled Prussia, where they were forbidden to own land, to settle in Russia, then eventually in Mexico.

The Anabaptist diaspora kicked off in 18^th Century Europe and spread all over the world, but the majority of the communities settled in the United States. A quick glance at The Budget finds columns from Pennsylvania where the Amish first fled from persecution, to Alabama, to Kentucky, to Montana. Predominantly, the Amish, a sub-group of the larger Mennonite umbrella, left the Swiss/Alsace region of Europe to find the religious freedom to practice their beliefs that rejected infant baptism, military killing, and swearing oaths of allegiance to the state.

This week’s Budget column from Fredericksburg, Ohio began with a description of the eclipse:

Screech owl hooted. In the Speelman Bottom 18 deer came out to feed. The eclipse goggles were great. But our youngest one was worried the birds will become blind since they don’t have the convenience of these glasses. Our oldest Hershberger in church wondered if the hens will lay twice since it was expected they’ll go roost.

Then at the end of this column, another animal became a main character in a story about a benefit auction:

The auction seemed well-attended with some high-priced items, which is good. One of my uncles deemed it wise to check on buying a tall night-stand, there at the auction for his wife’s side of the bed, giving her a convenient spot to park her glasses and dentures, instead of on the floor. Recently, one morning they searched high and low around the bed for those teeth of hers. Bed cover shaken, nothing. In the living room underneath the recliner they were found then, all honor to the house pup. . .Teeth got thoroughly scrubbed!

Photo: Mary Swander.

 But it was the wind that carried the theme of the rest of this week’s paper. A scribe in Albia, Iowa, thanked the previous owners of their farm for the plantings that block the fierce spring winds:

Andy and Millie, I don’t know if you read these or not, but we’ve often been thankful for the plants and trees you planted, now for our benefit. Also, the evergreen wind block on the north–that is a real blessing in good old IA! Smile.

In contrast, in Nashville, Arkansas, the scribe didn’t have such a good experience with the wind:

Later Mon. evening a thunderstorm from the south brought several gusts of wind. A neighbor was burning brush behind Grace Point Mennonite Church and the wind caused it to spread and put the building in danger. Our fire department responded to the call and soon had it under control.

Then wedged into the right-hand corner of the next page of The Budget: a story of a visit to the Schlabach’s former family home near the village of Jessberg in Hesse, Germany. The family had once occupied a house that now stored bagged fertilizer and garden supplies. Two hundred years before, the Schlabachs had left everything behind to set sail for the United States:

The Schlabach family had boarded the ship “James von Bremen” at the port city of Bremen on the Weser River on April 19, 1820. Due to “adverse winds and storm,” which prolonged the ocean crossing to three and a half months, it was not until the 15^th of August that the ship first touched shore at the harbor in New York.

In the end, it’s the columns of the scribes in international locations that most interest me. I followed the Waterford, Ireland community throughout the pandemic, intrigued by the lockdowns there, the quarantines, and the romance between a member of the community with a man in the U.S. I traced the travels of the prospective groom. He had to bring proof of vaccination from the United States, then isolate once he had arrived in Waterford before he could be married to his beloved.

I saw the war in Ukraine through the eyes of communities in Suceava, Romania who ran medical supplies through Moldova into their ravaged neighboring country. The Mennonites drove trucks toward Odesa, risking their lives, bombs and missiles dropping around them. A February 14, 2024 entry again reported on this Mobile Medical Team:

The first week they worked in several villages in the Mykolaiv region that was very destroyed. Last week, the team spent about 2 days working in the Chernihiv region, which is very near the Russian border. These villages were not as destroyed as the one in Mykolaiv since the 2 opposing armies only traveled through them and did not clash there.

The team enjoyed their time with the believers in these areas. These people have lived through so much. The one family stayed in their homes during the occupation. One day, a Russian tank came barreling up to their house. The boys stepped outside and raised their hands to show that they were not armed. The soldiers rushed out of their tank and did the same. It is comical to think about but sad to realize the tremendous fear that war brings into people’s hearts.

And finally, the Christian Aid Ministries scribe in Jerusalem dramatized the tremendous fear that lives in the hearts of those in Gaza and Israel. On January 31, 2024, she wrote:

. . .Fifty miles from here, the conditions in Gaza continue to worsen. I hear it by the news and from bits and pieces of information from Palestinian friends who have family in Gaza. Daily, and especially at night, I hear the low rumble of fighter jets overhead. The sound is not terrifying, but it is a reminder that one more bomb will explode in Gaza.

On February 21, 2024, the Jerusalem scribe wrote :

Since the bombardment, 1.9 million Gazans have been internally displaced. Some shelter in makeshift tents. Some have sought asylum in Australia and other countries, but most do not have the $5,000 fee needed to get through the border. The Christian family that we know by name has spent the past months in schoolrooms at the churchyard. Most days are long days of boredom, but a sniper can show up at any time, bringing moments of terror. .

Six Gazan babies, each with a caretaker, have been in Bethlehem since the war began. They have fully recovered from their open-heart surgeries, but now cannot return to their families in their war-torn homeland.

Then this week, the Jerusalem scribe continued:

What a difference a day makes—or maybe a night. Our thoughts had been about the war in Gaza. That changed late Sat. night and early Sun. morning when more than 300 drones and missiles were fired from Iran towards Israel–1,100 miles from their launch points. Most of them were taken down before they reached Israel, but there was plenty of missile activity about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

I was awakened about 1:30 a.m. with the whistle of the warning siren and the boom of intercepted missiles. I wasn’t frightened. I was saddened. Neighbors were watching the drone and missile activity from their rooftops. . .

Today is a balmy spring day with not a cloud in the sky. Schools and offices are closed, but the shops are open. Ben Gurion airport was closed for a few hours last evening but is open today. I still have a ticket to fly to the States on the 16^th because of an expired visa. I trust for no more missile activity so that the airport can remain open.

This country certainly needs your prayers.

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