Peaceful Societies

Some Hutterite children in South Dakota are attending a public school, at least for the time being, because the one at their colony burned down. The story provides some insights into the approaches taken by the Hutterites to educating their children.

According to a news report from Brookings, SD, the school at the Red Willow Colony, 3 miles south and 4.5 miles west of the small town of Toronto, burned to the ground on Monday, January 6. By the end of the week, colony elders had made arrangements to bus the seven school-age children in the colony to the Deubrook Elementary School in Toronto.

Colony elders and parents of the children have expressed the wish that contacts between the local Toronto children and the Hutterite kids be minimized. In response, Kevin Keenaghan, superintendent of the school district, said that “we’re trying to abide by their parents’ wishes and watching out for how much contact they have with the other children.” He arranged for the Hutterite children and their teacher to use their own classroom at the Toronto school, to minimize contacts with the local kids.

The small school building on the colony grounds was next to a mobile home, which caught fire due to a malfunctioning heater/air conditioner unit. Both structures burned down. Elders at the colony considered sending the children to a larger school at another Hutterite colony farther to the south, but they decided that the longer commute was not in their best interests.

Instead, the non-Hutterite teacher, Cindy Olson, commutes to the colony every morning from her home in Brookings. By 8:45 am, when the colony German teacher is finished with his lessons in the German language and Hutterite beliefs, she takes the wheel of a colony van and drives the children the short distance to the Toronto school.

Superintendent Keenaghan said that the colony owned the building but the school district provided, and of course lost, the supplies inside it. Those supplies included a laptop for the teacher, two other laptops, six workstations, reference books, student’s books, and teaching materials. The colony bans televisions, but it allows the use of instructional materials on computers—though the machines have very limited access to the Internet.

He indicated that the seven school children come from only two families at the colony, and they range from kindergarten through 8th grade—a “typical one-room country school,” he said. The kids from Red Willow are bringing their own lunches to the Toronto school. In the middle of the afternoon, Ms. Olson drives the children back to the colony and leaves them there, along with the van.

Mr. Keenaghan told the journalist that colony elders had informed him they would be rebuilding the school on the colony grounds very soon, but they haven’t told him exactly when.

Hostetler (1974) gives additional background to the information about Hutterite educational practices provided by the news report. He writes that the public schools located at the colonies are taught by outsiders, with the curriculum including reading and writing in English. This provides a deliberate contrast to the German instruction by a colony elder that starts every school day.

The children thus learn to associate their own customs and beliefs with the German language and the ways of the outside world with the English language. The Hutterites recognize the importance of their children mastering both languages and being fully aware of the culture of the non-Hutterites that surround their colonies.

A Malaysian newspaper published a series of three articles early last week analyzing the harm that rampaging logging is causing to the Batek people. They live on the fringes of the world famous Taman Negara National Park in northern Peninsular Malaysia, which also is being impacted by the lumbering activities. Using the Google translation service, the original Malay language stories can be easily understood.

The first article said that the park, also called locally Kuala Koh National Park, has preserved more or less the same ecosystem for an estimated 130 million years. Furthermore, the park permits the indigenous Orang Asli people of the area, the Batek, to live in their communities and practice their traditional subsistence lifestyle.

The park is visited by nature lovers from around the world who are attracted by the peace and the opportunities to see diverse flora and fauna. It is known to include 286 species of mammals, 479 bird species, more than 495 species of freshwater fish, and 51 species of herps—amphibians and reptiles.

According to the journalists, the two major rivers in the northern part of the park, the Koh River and the River Lebir, are increasingly threatened by pollution. The Deputy President of the Malaysian Nature Society, Dr. Ahmad Ismail, accompanied the journalists in their investigation of the situation in and around the park.

After a trip along a rough road toward the park entrance, they took a boat ride on the River Lebir. They saw clear evidence of felled trees and erosion of the river banks. The pilot of the boat, Zulkifli Mansor, told his passengers that the river turns cloudy like milky tea whenever it rains. This is a new phenomenon dating only from the logging of the last couple months, he said. He added that he was worried the lumbering would harm the park’s plants and animals.

A 30 minute boat ride led to a Batek village located only half a kilometer from a pile of logs. The Batek in this community, as a result of the logging, have lost their access to clear, unpolluted water. They were quite concerned also about the graves of their ancestors, which are threatened by the logging. The journalists detected tensions in the faces of members of the 70 families in the village.

The second report continues the story of the visit to the park and the Batek people. Evidently, the Batek now have to use water that has drained off nearby oil palm plantations for their cooking and bathing. They worry about toxic chemical fertilizers in the polluted water. They have to walk long distances to get even that, polluted as it is.

The village headman, Hamdan Keladi, 40, described the results of the situation. After two or three days of bathing in the polluted water, he said that his body tingles. He added, however, that as yet they had not had health problems or vomiting from using the water for cooking or drinking.

Hamden also said that the surrounding forest had already been surveyed for logging. He indicated that farmers who had settled in the areas already cleared of forests had not had much positive contact with the Batek. They did not ask permission for using their land. He told the visitors that the logging could destroy their community, since they had not been given any written titles to the land they live on.

Other residents told the visitors that the logging activities in the area had harmed agricultural crops. One person, named Board Majid, said that the logging had harmed the rubber plantations and other crops, such as cassava and vegetables. However, he did not explain how the logging had impacted those crops.

Penang Hassan, another Batek, told the visitors that the authorities should act to control the rampant logging.

The third news story focused on the desecration of Batek graves. Jamil Hendi, 21, discussed his feelings of grief one day at seeing a bulldozer parked on top the grave of his son. Four other nearby graves had also been desecrated by the machine, parked there by unfeeling settlers.

He went on to say that the outsiders did not consider the reactions of the Batek in such matters—they only thought of their own needs and interests. He felt that the Malays not only ruined the lives of the Batek with the logging, they crushed their spirits as well. In the words of the Google translation, he said “this activity must be stopped immediately, before the situation [worsens].”

Another man, Jais Yam, 40, echoed his sentiments. He had left the area in a fairly peaceful condition, he explained, but when he returned recently everything had changed for the worse.

Last week the BBC published a moving story about living conditions in New Xade, a resettlement camp to which the G/wi were relocated by the government of Botswana. They were forced by government agents 16 years ago to load their belongings and themselves onto the backs of trucks, which took them to their new village. The trauma of the move clearly still haunts the G/wi and the other San people who were required to leave their homes in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR).

The BBC reporter, Pumza Fihlani, talks in New Xade with two women, Boitumelo Lobelo, 25, and her younger sister Goiotseone Lobelo, 21. Both are doing laundry and caring for their toddlers as the reporter speaks with them.

They remember the relocation vividly. “The police came, destroyed our homes and dumped us in the back of trucks with our belongings and brought us here. They dumped us here like we are nothing,” Goiotseone says. The women were just girls when the police came, but they well remember the enjoyable aspects of their former lives, such as joining older women in the bush collecting roots, nuts, and berries to eat.

They have been back to their former home site numerous times, but they’re not allowed to live there. A court decision in 2006 appeared, at first, to be a victory for the San people, granting them what they had requested—the right of return to their homeland inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

But the government subsequently decided that the court ruling only would apply to the litigants whose names actually appeared on the court suit, not to their wives and children or other members of the San societies. They have to make separate applications in order to be permitted to make brief visits.

The Lobelo sisters become angry describing living conditions in the resettlement camp to Ms. Fihlani. Boitumelo tells her, “we are getting AIDS and other diseases we didn’t know about; young people are drinking alcohol; young girls are having babies. Everything is wrong here.”

The reporter relates stories of government oppression against the peaceful indigenous people, but she provides readers with the government argument that the relocation was justified in order to protect the wildlife and natural ecosystem of the CKGR. She writes, however, that the G/wi and the other San peoples had subsisted sustainably in their traditional desert homes for millennia on hunting and gathering.

Ms. Fihlani says that diamond mining is about to start in the reserve, after years of preparations. She writes that the government has always denied any connection between the forced relocations and the diamond industry, though she does not mention that former Botswana President Festus Mogae as much as admitted there was such a connection in a speech in Mumbai in 2005.

The tragedy for the G/wi in New Xade is that they have not learned how to live as herders. When they were dumped at their new home sites, each family was given five cattle or goats, which it was assumed would encourage them to become pastoralists rather than continue to be hunters and gatherers.

Their problem has been that they don’t have the knowledge to take care of herd animals effectively. According to Jumanda Galekebone, a spokesman for the group, “if you push somebody to a certain kind of lifestyle that he doesn’t know, he will be facing a lot of difficulties.”

He explains that the people don’t really understand how to take care of their animals when they get sick. Along with some other people sitting under a thorn tree, Mr. Galekebone elaborates on their woes. Modern life has simply not worked for them, and they want to go home.

Mr. Galekebone explains that life for the San people in New Xade hasn’t helped anyone. “We still get a lot of people going inside the park to hunt and they get arrested. Some of us here are facing court penalties for hunting. It just proves that you can’t force change on people.”

Roy Sesana, another San leader, is one of the people whose name was on the 2006 court papers, so he is allowed to live at his original home in the CKGR. But his family is not—he must travel to New Xade to be with them. “We have been separated from our children and our wives,” he says. “What kind of life is this? We didn’t do anything to deserve this.”

He continues, angrily, decrying the government food handouts as an affront to people who have always provided their own food from the bush. “We are being made lazy and stupid,” he says. “Now we are being treated like dogs.”

A new footbridge over a river in the Philippines may assist recovery efforts for the endangered tamaraw as well as help the local Buid and Tau-Buid communities. A report in a Philippine news service described the older bridge, which the new one replaced, as “a rickety cable footbridge.” The new, 103 meter (338 feet) bridge, inaugurated recently with some fanfare, promises to ease local transportation needs.

The bridge is evidently located near the Tamaraw Gene Pool Farm, a facility that had attempted, without much success, to breed in captivity the very rare tamaraw, a small bovine relative of the water buffalo that lives in only a few locations on Mindoro Island.

The Mounts Iglit-Baco National Park, also known as the Mangyan Heritage Park, is a large, 75,445 hectare (186,428 acre) tract to the north of the Gene Pool Farm. The park was established primarily to protect habitat for the rare animal. According to an article in the Wikipedia, the tamaraw is “one of the most seriously endangered animals in the world.”

Officials from the park, the gene pool farm, the provincial government, conservation groups, and representatives of the Buid and Tau-Buid communities in the area attended the opening of the new bridge. Grace Diamante, director of the Mindoro Biodiversity Conservation Foundation, said, “the bridge will not only serve the people of Barangay Manoot, particularly our brothers and sisters of the Tau-Buid and Buhid groups, but will also allow more people to know more about the Tamaraw and the biodiversity of Mindoro.”

Rod Agas from the gene pool farm added his praise for the new bridge, indicating that it would be important in planning for the future protection of biodiversity on the island. He pointed out the fact that the gene pool farm can care for animals rescued from poachers and rehabilitate them before releasing them back into the wild.

Rodel Boyles, the Protected Area Superintendent of the national park, who is also the concurrent project manager of the Tamaraw Conservation Program, respects the prerogatives of the two indigenous peoples who live in the area and have the legal right to hunt the Tamaraw. The Buid and the Tau-Buid “have their own beliefs on how to utilize the resources within the park,” according to the TCP website, so Boyles “engages them in constant dialogue on floral and faunal conservation efforts” to protect the biodiversity of the region.

A news release a couple months ago from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) provided details on the efforts to conserve the tamaraw, the numbers of which have dropped to less than a thousand, and perhaps as low as a few hundred animals.

It quoted a leader of the Tau-Buid people, Fausto Novelozo, who said, in an English translation provided by the WWF, “without the tamaraw, there will be no Tau-Buid. Lives and livelihoods are inextricably tied with biodiversity.”

Some Zapotec from Coatecas Altas, in Mexico’s Oaxaca state, started an annual festival in Madera, California, in 2009 and it has grown steadily since then. Called La Fiesta del Pueblo, the celebration began as a way for people from the Mexican town to celebrate their community saint, San Juan Evangelista.

Juan Santiago, a young Zapotec man, spoke to a reporter last week about the celebration this year on December 28th, which was also described in detail by a news story in January 2012. He explained that the reason for the festival in Madera, a small city in the Central Valley, is that many of the local Zapotec are undocumented immigrants who have not been able to visit their home communities in Mexico for 10, 15, or even 20 years. The Zapotec people miss their traditional festivals, he said, so “they ask to reproduce some of the traditions.”

The news story last week focused on the dancing, with the crowds in the ballroom enjoying the loud music. A photo shows a small, costumed bull, a “torito,” dancing in the crowd. The news story two years ago described other activities that were part of the fiesta, such as a basketball game and a 22 mile run.

Mr. Santiago said that most of the Zapotec immigrants in the Central Valley came to the U.S. after first migrating to other Mexican states, arriving north of the border after the immigration reform of 1986—so most of them are undocumented. Other indigenous groups from Oaxaca, such as the Mixtecs, he said, arrived before that reform, so they can legally and easily—and fairly frequently—visit their home villages and families in Mexico.

Santiago explains that his own family typifies the Zapotec experience. His father migrated north first, followed by his brothers then his wife and children. The Zapotec are primarily a farming people, so they settled in rural California, particularly the Madera area of the San Joaquin Valley, to do what they are most comfortable doing: farm work.

The Fiesta del Pueblo “is helping people to get involved in the community,” Santiago explains. “It takes a year to organize it, so the organizing committee has to deal with several people, organization.” He adds, “you feel these activities educate you [and prepare] you to go around better in our community.”

He sees added benefits for the Zapotec in the valley from participating in the festival. Many of the farm workers are single and living alone—men whose families are far away. “So they come to the Fiesta and they enjoy and forget for awhile the nostalgia and the loneliness.”

Although the fiesta started as a celebration of the saint of a particular town in Oaxaca, it is growing as other Mexican indigenous people have begun participating. Other organizations and agencies are helping plan for the festival next year.

Two leading Indian newspapers featured different Birhor communities last week, one painting a bleak picture of rural poverty, the other portraying a sense of hope.

The Times of India sent a reporter to the Ramgarh District in Jharkhand state to visit the very poor village of Birhor Tola. The residents have to light fires every night to survive the evening chill, which can go down to 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit). They do not have enough warm clothing or blankets for the winter weather.

Kailu Birhor tells the reporter that, in order to survive, they “collect coal from nearby coal dumps of Central Coalfields Limited (CCL) and go to the forest in search of wood.” Mangar Birhor, from the same village, adds that blankets they were given a couple years ago have worn out and they are hoping for some help in the form of new blankets, so they can once again sleep in their huts.

The reporter adds that the Birhor traditionally have thrived on their hunting skills, but government authorized projects, which have decimated the forests, have had a severe impact on the people. Jhaman Mahto, a social worker, explained, “It is clear why [the] Birhors have been deprived for so long… because of government and corporate interests in massive mineral reserves in the forest.”

But government officials are defensive—they have always supported the Birhor, one said, and they will continue to do so. One official, whom the newspaper does not name, commented “we make huts for them and also provide food for them. The government is planning to come up with more schemes for protecting them.” He admitted that the government agencies only became concerned about the Birhor when international attention was focused on the people.

The reporter adds, tartly, that the government schemes were initiated a few years ago, but without any effective studies to determine what the Birhor needs really were. Many Birhor men have migrated to other areas for jobs, since the prices of rice and potatoes have soared and the people do not have enough to eat. Government welfare schemes have not filled their needs. Mangar added that the people were forced to beg for handouts, and to collect firewood and coal to generate a meager income.

Bheekhu, another Birhor from the same village, summarized their difficult situation: “We have always undergone a lot of problems. Life has always been tough and unfair to us,” he said.

A story in The Telegraph of Calcutta gives a more hopeful picture of conditions in Chalkari, a different Birhor village in the Bokaro District of Jharkhand, which is next to the Ramgarh District. The Telegraph article describes a picnic that Ashutosh Mairh, the principal of a school in Chalkari, organized on the last day of 2013. The school has a lot of Birhor children enrolled in it. Mr. Mairh and his outreach programs for the Birhor have been covered in 2008, 2009, and 2011 by major Indian news media.

Mairh, five other adults, and some young people helped organized a picnic for nearly 200 Birhor children in a park on the banks of Topchanchi Lake, a 214 acre reservoir and wildlife refuge that attracts thousands of visitors each year. The principal admitted he was affected when some Birhor youngsters told him they had been searching for food from the trash left by picnickers along the lakeshore. “They urged us to organize a picnic for them and we did,” Mairh said.

The principal added that the adults did not draw on public funds for the picnic. Instead, they raised money for the costs from teachers, parents, and students, and drove to the lakeshore in their own vehicles. He explained that the purpose of the picnic was to provide a park-like venue for the Birhor children to mix with the non-Birhor kids who were also there.

Mr. Mairh wanted the two groups of youngsters to learn about each other’s cultures and traditions. The children played tug of war, pitto, kit kit, and kabaddi. Pradip Birhor, the 14 year old son of Bara Sukar, the headman of Chalkari, told the reporter, “for the first time, we participated in a picnic and enjoyed everything to the hilt.”

The Telegraph report describes Mr. Mairh as one of the founders of Samvedna, an organization formed to address Birhor issues. It does not indicate if the group is proposing any solutions to the underlying causes of Birhor poverty.

The new Egyptian constitution, completed at the beginning of December, included a few political gains for the Nubians, but at least one young intellectual activist is not entirely satisfied. Fatma Emam Sakory, a freelance researcher and translator, was a member of the consultative office of Haggag Oddoul, the senior Nubian writer who represented the Nubians on the 50 member constitution writing committee. She expresses her views, with considerable candor, in an opinion piece published last week.

Ms. Sakory makes it clear that the new constitution “does not match the dreams of my generation” but she does concede that it is probably the best that the Nubian community has achieved so far. Her article, published in the independent, online Egyptian newspaper Mada Masr, portrays her struggle to come to terms with her own Nubian ethnicity and its place in contemporary Egyptian society.

She tells only her own story, but the interest of the piece is that it may represent the thinking and beliefs of many younger Nubians. She admits she does not speak the Nubian language. Her parents were born in Cairo and throughout her youth she avoided confronting her own identity.

Her memories of childhood were of her own Arabic speaking upbringing and of elderly relatives at family gatherings who preferred to converse in Nubian. She remembers a great grandmother telling her stories in Nubian, and while she didn’t understand what the old lady was saying, she loved to listen to her. Her father was in favor of Egyptian nationalism, supported the construction of the Aswan High Dam, and downplayed his Nubian heritage.

“Although every detail in my life screamed that I belong to the Nubian community, I shied away from engaging with Nubian activism,” she writes. That lasted until the revolution of January 25, 2010, when her life changed. She became a Nubian activist, met people in the Nubian Democratic Youth Union, and, through them, other young Nubian leaders.

Ms. Sakory writes that she quickly discovered that she had to struggle against discrimination because of her gender and her youth. She was nominated by the Youth Union for the 50 member constitution committee, but Haggag Oddoul was chosen as a compromise candidate. She felt honored to participate in his consultative support group.

She discovered the dissensions and differences within the ranks of the Nubian activists. Young people, for instance, many of whom, like her, could not speak Nubian, were avidly seeking the preservation and teaching of their language. Elders were struggling to maintain their positions of compromise and accommodation with the forces of the dominant society, against younger activists seeking to make new gains for the Nubian people. She gained an understanding of the complexities of the Nubian concerns.

There were numerous distressing aspects of the constitution writing process, such as the attitudes of Egyptian leaders toward Nubian issues. During discussions of the full committee, she felt the Egyptian leaders were dismissive—and too many Nubians were submissive—when confronting issues that the community was deeply concerned about.

When Sameh Ashour presided over a session of the committee discussing Nubian issues, he rarely allowed young Nubians to even speak, and he displayed an ignorance about their concerns that reflects the misunderstandings of many Egyptians about the Nubian community.

“Why do you ask for a right of return? Is there a land to return to?” he asked. He acted as if he were ignorant of the fact that the Nubians really don’t want to return to the land at the bottom of Lake Nasser. Many simply want to return to communities developed along the shores of the former Nile River, a demand they have been making many, many times. A session conducted by committee member Haggag Oddoul about Nubian issues only attracted 6 of the 50 members.

Ms. Sakory describes the politics within the Nubian movement—elderly leaders trying to maintain the minimal gains they made during the Mubarak era, versus younger ones attempting to forge new approaches to gaining rights for the people. She was angered, she admits, to read the opinions of some members of the Egyptian intelligentsia who claim that recognizing the Nubian language and heritage would somehow weaken national unity.

But she was pleased that the constitution did incorporate at least some articles that will recognize the Nubians and their rights. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender, race, color, religion, creed, ability, and geographical origin. Another triumph in the constitution is an article stipulating that development of remote areas of the nation, such as the Sinai Peninsula and Nubia, should be done in consultation with the people living in those regions.

But the Nubians also suffered losses in the document. They had hoped that Nubia would be recognized, in the preamble, as a constituent of the cultural mosaic of Egypt, but they did not gain that one.

Ms. Sakory is distressed that the constitution allows for military trials of civilians. She rejects the idea that the rights and actions of women are subject, in the constitution, to the understanding that they must not contradict the tenets of Sharia. She dislikes the fact that minority religious rights, such as those of the Baha’is, are not guaranteed, and that Muslim religious institutions still have the authority to intervene in public affairs.

She emphasizes that the views she expresses are entirely her own, but they are nonetheless worth careful study as possibly representing the forward thinking of younger Nubians and future leaders.

The Star, a Malaysian newspaper, ran a feature story last week by Ann Marie Chandy about the celebration of Christmas in a Semai village in Perak state. The author does not identify the village by name, nor does she indicate what percentage of the community is Christian. But her report conveys the charm of the Semai people working with church members from a Malaysian city to celebrate Christmas together.

The story began when a group of people in her church decided to embark on an outreach project to a Semai community, though not through donations of actual gifts. Instead, a community worker named Jasmine Adaickalam advised them that the most effective way to reach out would be to work together on projects instead of just giving gifts. That would respect the Semai culture and ways and would enrich their sense of self worth and dignity.

The church group formulated a program in which they wanted to feel as if they had “adopted” the Semai community. The Semai in the chosen village formed a committee of their own to work with the church members, so they could contribute their ideas as to what was needed.

The church members had their own agenda, the author admits, to instill a love of learning in the children. They also wanted to encourage community elders and leaders to develop an appreciation of their rights so they could help keep the community healthy. The Semai village of about 150 people has neither electricity nor a piped in water supply, and the children don’t attend school.

The combined groups decided to work together to put on a Christmas program in the village, one which would reflect the talents and perspectives of the Semai themselves. After months of planning, the village put on their Yuletide pageant the Saturday before Christmas. But unlike such celebrations in other parts of the world, this Christmas event would incorporate traditional Semai approaches. The journalist was impressed by the results.

In order to put on a nativity play, the Semai children, ages 6 to 12, crafted unique headgear which they wove out of palm leaves to indicate the different characters and roles in the age-old story. The shepherds, for instance, wore donated football jerseys, but their headgear indicated their special roles.

Then they sang the familiar carols, such as “Angels We Have Heard on High”, in the Semai language. The people made percussion instruments out of bamboo sticks to accompany the singing. They had built benches for the guests to sit on in a tent which kept out the rain. The city people, who had come out to the Perak rainforest by bus, brought face paints and ice cream, and they helped organized a hockey match.

The writer was impressed with the confidence of the children as they performed their parts, plus the organizational ability of the adults who helped plan the event. She appreciated the welcoming spirit of the community toward the city visitors.

Ms. Chandy includes in her report a half dozen fetching photos of the Semai children, their community, and their Christmas tree, a local shrub with woven ornaments on it.

For a long time, the Mangyan people on Mindoro Island, especially the Buid and the Bangon, have ventured into Calapan City during the Christmas season to beg on the streets.

Nine years ago, Philippine news stories reported that those two animist peoples, who live primarily in the south central mountains of the island, have seen December as a good time to take advantage of the charitable feelings of the Christian majority by begging from them. As Agnep, a young Bangon man, recently commented to a reporter, “the Christians are right that Christmas is giving: they give; we receive.”

A news report last week indicated that some Mangyan peoples have persisted in their annual begging tradition, but the good citizens of the city have decided to put an end to it. Residents jeer at the Mangyans, according to the author of the article, and consider the begging by the tribal people as an “eyesore” and a “nuisance.”

Agnep walked over 60 miles (100 km) with his wife and two little children from their home in the mountains into the city to beg. The Buid live to the south of the Bangon, even farther from Calapan City. Agnep and his family were in the municipality of Bongabong, south of Calapan City when the reporter spoke with them.

The article quotes Bishop Warlito Cajandig of Calapan as saying that city officials had met with 40 different leaders of the tribal groups to tell them that the caroling and begging on the streets would no longer be permitted during the Christmas season. “Somebody must teach them how to live decently,” the bishop said.

The Mayor of Calapan City, Arnan Panaligan, indicated that Christians in the city would be soliciting donations to benefit the Mangyan people. The donations will be taken to Bongabong, which is much near to the Bangon and Buid communities.

Mayor Panaligan decried the fact that when the Mangyans come into the city, they eat and sleep in the streets, exposed to the weather and to unscrupulous people. By distributing foods to them in Bongabong, the Mangyan will be safer, he says.

Evidently the decision by the city to prohibit begging had not reached Agnep’s village, since he and his family had walked all the way to Calapan City in vain. They were waiting for the rain to ease so they could return to their home. “We had a short holiday,” he said.

According to a Lancaster County news report last week, a group of nearly three dozen Anabaptists returned from a visit to Israel during the last week of November. The Amish, Mennonite, and Hutterite people from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Idaho, Canada, and Montana traveled to the Holy Land to try and develop positive relationships with the Jews. It was the third such trip by the group.

The news story focused on some Amish (or excommunicated Amish) people from Lancaster and Lebanon Counties, Pennsylvania, and their reasons for taking the trip. Apparently they wanted to tell the Israelis that they are sorry for the way Christians have treated the Jews over the centuries. They acknowledged that not only Christians in general, but members of Anabaptist communities in particular, had hardened their hearts to the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust—and throughout history.

Steve Lapp from Ephrata, Jonas Stoltzfus from Paradise, and Aaron Lapp, Jr., from Gordonville, all spoke about the value of their trip. They expressed their remorse about the history of Christian/Jewish relations. Stoltzfus acknowledged that there had not been much outreach to the Jewish community right in Lancaster County, but he said there had been a trip to a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, in 2008.

After the trip to Brooklyn, the group organized a trip to Israel in 2010. The visit in 2013 was their third to the Holy Land. The trip organizers see numerous similarities among conservative Jews and conservative Anabaptists: distinctive styles of dress, strong family and community values, a respect for hard work, and a firm focus on the wisdom of the Old Testament.

The trip accomplished more than just gestures of good will to Israeli and Jewish leaders. Participants were pleased to be able to “walk where Jesus walked, where David walked. It made it very real,” said Steve Lapp. They visited Nazareth, the City of David, the Old City in Jerusalem, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, and the Masada. They went out in a boat on the Sea of Galilee.

One of the highlights of the trip was a visit with the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, David Lau. The group was singing hymns while waiting for the arrival of the Chief Rabbi. When he entered the room, he welcomed the visitors warmly and requested an encore of the hymn, “Marching to Zion,” which they had been singing as he came in.

Rabbi Lau concluded the meeting by blessing the Anabaptists and praying for peace among all peoples. The Jerusalem Post wondered if this may have been the first time that a Christian hymn had been sung in the office of the Chief Rabbinate in Jerusalem.

The news article in Lancasteronline.com indicates that Jonas Stultzfus was excommunicated from the Amish Church three years ago. From the website of the Lapp family, it appears as if Steve Lapp and some of his relatives left the Old Order Amish society in order to pursue a mission of faith healing. They state on their website that they live in motor homes and travel around the country to preach their message of “overcoming the past, walking in forgiveness, experiencing healing, and maximizing our potential in the Kingdom of God on earth.”

While some aspects of what the group is doing, such as flying to Israel in a modern jet, may not meet the approval of the Old Order Amish districts, their messages of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation are very much in line with traditional Anabaptist values.

Peaceful Societies

Peaceful Societies

Hutterite Colony School Burns Down

Batek Suffering from Logging

G/wi are Being “Treated Like Dogs”

The Tamaraw and the Buid

Central California Zapotec Festival

Birhor Poverty Finds Relief in a Picnic

Nubian Recognition in New Egyptian Constitution

A Semai Christmas

Buid Begging

Amish Evangelists Preach Forgiveness

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