Peaceful Societies

It is “a dangerous alarm,” warned Nubian activist and lawyer Salah Zaki Mourad, when the peaceful Nubians feel compelled to take up arms in order to protect themselves and their property. Yahia Zaied, a spokesperson for the Democratic Union of Nubian Youth, added to this, in a press conference last Wednesday, that the military rulers of Egypt continue to mismanage the southern part of the country, where they ignore the problems of the local people.

Zaied charged that the government responded inadequately to the recent collapse of a bridge over a canal in southern Nubia, near Abu Simbel. Two schools and 50 houses were flooded, but the government only sent a rescue mission 12 hours later. The Governor of Aswan, Mostapha El-Sayed, told the press after the bridge collapsed that the famed Abu Simbel monuments were unaffected. Zaied ranted: “As if Egyptians should only care about the monuments and let’s forget about the safety of the human beings…”

He apparently raised his points forcefully. “The Egyptian state only cares about the monuments there, only after international organizations like … UNESCO decided to save the heritage, but there was no concern for the humans who lost their culture and legacy.”

He presented the familiar argument that the Nubians want to be relocated again, since the government in the 1960s made lots of promises but the people were moved to totally inadequate places when the Aswan High Dam was built. They were relocated far from the Nile, which they see as their cultural center. The additional problem was that other, non-Nubian groups were allowed to move into the new villages that the government built, as if Egypt wanted to dilute and perhaps destroy Nubian culture. “We do not know if these were attempts to change the demography of the area or if it is a way to cause a rift between Nubians and other fellow Egyptians,” he said.

Mr. Zaied claimed that police protection has been removed from Nubia, and organized gangs of thugs are now roaming the countryside, attacking Nubians, stealing valuables, and vandalizing property. “We do have our own reasons to believe that these attacks by thugs are done in coordination with police forces,” he said. “Members of popular committees met with [the] head of Aswan Security Directorate and gave him a full list of the names of the thugs and where they live, but nothing was done since then.”

The spokesperson further argued that during three successive governments, all under the control of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the security situation in Nubia has not improved. This strongly suggests that the military rulers of Egypt are indifferent about the Nubian problems—as previous governments of Egypt have been. Representatives of several political parties attending the press conference offered their support for the Egyptian minority groups.

Other Nubian leaders joined in voicing their criticisms. Ahmed Raghed, a lawyer who is head of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, said that the ousted regime of President Mubarak, refused to focus on minority rights and argued that the problems of the Nubians could be seen as a challenge to the unity of the Egyptian state. Anyone championing minority rights was threatening the state and inviting foreign intervention. “We need to redefine the Egyptian national fabric,” Raghed said. “We are not one entity or one culture like the ousted regime has been telling us; we are based on diversity, not homogeneity.”

Elham Eidarous, a representative of the Popular Socialist Alliance Party, seconded that argument. He said that the policy of developing the nation as if it is a unified entity has to be changed, since it has clearly failed. He made the point that international model charters of human rights uphold the principle that minority populations need to be consulted about development plans. He believes that should apply to the Nubians.

Sally Sami, a representative of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, similarly criticized the military rulers for continuing the inappropriate policies of the Mubarak regime toward the Nubians. “We have to merge our general issues like freedom and social justice with the specific problems of minorities, citizenship, and environmental issues,” she said.

At the end of last week, the Elections Commission announced the winners of the recent rounds of polling. As expected, the Freedom and Justice Party of the Muslim Brotherhood won 47 percent of the seats in the lower house of the new parliament. But tensions remain high—protesters demand the end of the military government, which took power when Mubarak left office a year ago. The generals insist they will remain in power until a newly elected president takes over at the end of June. It is clear that the Nubians, along with many other Egyptians, are very eager for a representative government to begin.

Kidder and Hostetler wrote a memorable article 22 years ago that discussed the Amish approach to working things out with local bureaucrats, thus liberating officials from their need to obey all the rules. A routine announcement last week in a local Pennsylvania newspaper—that some Amish want to build a school—prompts the reader to remember the scholarly research.

The issues mentioned in the news story are comparatively minor. Ones that can be worked out; compromises that can probably be reached. At least, that’s the tone of the news report. The issue is that near Myerstown, in Lebanon County just to the north of Lancaster County, the Amish have applied for a permit to build a school, to be located at the southern end of Golf Road, near the intersection with PA 501.

A local surveying and engineering company, Matthew & Hockley Associates, represented by R. Scott Carpenter, applied to the Jackson Township Supervisors at their meeting last week for an exemption from the township’s water and sewer ordinance. The Amish want their new school building to have privies rather than indoor bathrooms. They also do not want running water on the site. The children would bring their own drinks from home.

Tom Houtz, Vice Chairman of the Board, asked if a stipulation could be attached. If the board decided to approve the request and the building would subsequently be sold to another party, then the exemption would expire. The township solicitor, Paul Bametzreider, read the relevant ordinance, which states that, if a proposed building is built within 150 feet of a source of public water, it must be connected to that water system, once the builder is notified of the ordinance.

“So if the notice is never received from the township, then it wouldn’t be required,” the attorney added. One can imagine him winking as he said that. Finding creative ways of allowing the Amish to get around local ordinances is part of the culture of southeastern Pennsylvania, to judge by Kidder and Hostetler.

One of the supervisors, Clyde Deck, expressed concerns about the lack of fresh water on the site. An Amish man attending the meeting, who did not give his name, said that at another school in the township, the children and the teacher wash their hands in collected rainwater, and they bring their own drinks with their lunches. Gene Meede, the township zoning officer, told the supervisors that the project would also need a variance from the zoning ordinance due to the simple fact that a school would not be permitted in what is presently zoned as an agricultural district.

Since the article in the Lebanon Daily News does not indicate that the supervisors took any action, one can presume they delayed making a decision. The interesting point about the report is the attitude of the township attorney—his publicly suggesting a creative approach to finding a way for the Amish to get what they want without violating the letter of the law.

The article represents a contrast to news reports from other parts of the U.S., where local officials and attorneys are much more intent on making sure that the Amish adhere to the strict letter of local law. Numerous news reports last fall covered conflicts in Western Kentucky over the refusal by members of the very strict Schwartzentruber Amish group to put orange safety triangles on their buggies. Several Amish men were sentenced to jail due to their religiously inspired obstinacy.

The issue keeps coming up, as judges in Kentucky continue to sentence more and more Amish men to jail over the issue. One news report about the safety triangles a couple weeks ago indicated that other states are finding ways to compromise, but apparently western Kentucky officials refuse. Their approach, enshrined in their laws, is the only way forward. Perhaps in this respect, southeastern Pennsylvania needs credit for its culture of finding creative compromises with the peaceful minority society.

Of course it helps, as Kidder and Hostetler point out, that the Amish represent hundreds of millions of dollars in tourist revenue to southeastern Pennsylvania. Bureaucrats are inspired to be creative because of the remote, but very real, possibility that they can’t hassle the Amish too much or they just might all sell their farms and move to another rural section of the continent. They might.

A lot of Internet services today are based on “the cloud,” but on the island of Tristan da Cunha, due to slow Internet connection speed, the practice of medicine is based partly on the gut—the intuition of the island’s doctor.

Dr. Gerard Bulger, the physician on Tristan da Cunha, has published an article describing his work on the isolated island in the South Atlantic. While his piece is written for other doctors in a British medical magazine, it provides interesting glimpses into the issues a GP faces in caring for the health of the Tristan Islanders.

Bulger describes the basic conditions of running a medical practice on an island 1,500 miles west of Cape Town, the nearest city, a six day trip if a boat happens to be passing by. Since there is no airstrip, no one is evacuated by plane in the event of an emergency. And the Internet speed is a pokey 512 kps, so if there were to be a serious medical problem, all other uses of the Internet on the island would have to stop so he could utilize the full bandwith. He would need to Skype with other medical people in South Africa or the UK. Dr. Bulger relies on his instincts a great deal.

He indicates that the Tristan Islanders are generally fit. People don’t sit around much, since they have to raise a lot of the food they eat. They tend their vegetable gardens, feed their ducks and chickens, move sheep and cows to different pastures, do some fishing, and go to work in the crayfish processing factory. There is full employment, he says, and many people work at more than one job. But the islanders do have common health problems such as obesity, high alcohol use, diabetes, and asthma.

He has no trained nursing or other medical assistance, so he has to do it all, with the help of other doctors via the Internet. While some of the details in his report would be of interest primarily to other physicians, he does give a good general impression of the challenges of a medical practice in a very isolated situation. His basic message is that he has to respond to everything with a great deal of creativity.

For instance, he comments that the incubator doesn’t work, but he is reluctant to get another one since they are apparently difficult to keep in good working order. Fertility is quite low on the island—there is only one pregnant woman at the moment. And because only one percent of babies are delivered before 32 weeks, the need for an incubator is quite limited. “Kangaroo care would seem the safer option,” he observes wryly.

He tells us he does a lot of the things that other doctors in the UK don’t do, or haven’t done since medical school. “When was the last time you looked at a blood film and counted it? Tried to grow stuff on a Petri dish?” He writes that one of his duties is to check the water supply—presumably for pollutants, though he doesn’t make that completely clear.

Other projects have included finding packages of unopened equipment, ordered by earlier doctors and never used. He also has to make sure the supplies in the pharmacy are kept up to date.

Dr. Bulger describes his training and experience on his own website, where he notes that he sold his medical practice in the UK in 2007. Their children were grown, he writes, “so we looked at working abroad.” He took a medical position in Cairns, Australia, in January 2009, and in November 2010 he took another in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

He doesn’t mention when he took the position on Tristan da Cunha, but an advertisement posted on Tristan’s own website in November 2011 indicates that the island will be seeking to fill a one-year appointment for the island doctor position, starting May 2012. “Work on the most remote inhabited island in the world,” the advertisement says. The ad does not list the challenges that Dr. Bulger describes, other than to say that the candidate needs to be “self-sufficient.”

Lye Tuck-Po visited the Batek once again over the long New Year’s weekend, and as usual she has posted some wonderful photos to her blog, including some charming ones of children and young people.

She no sooner returned to her home than she began posting her pictures. The first, on Friday January 6th, was a black and white image of a little girl. The child, who appears to be about five years old, has a whimsical smile as she reaches for the outstretched fingers of another kid who is not otherwise visible on the left.

Dr. Lye says in an email that she believes the child is named Apoy.

The next day she posted a video montage which she titled “With Batek at Was Yong, Taman Negara, 2012.” It consists of brief videos and still photos taken during the visit. The voices of the Batek themselves predominate, so we can get to hear their spoken language as well. Dr. Lye tells us that she spent a few splendid days with her friends while they dug for yams and fished.

She says that she used a boat on the Tembeling River to visit people, and she was able to catch up on the news with some folks she had not seen in 15 years. The “children were adorable,” she comments. When she learned that one elderly friend had died only three days after her visit in 2010, she realized once again how important it is for her to keep repeating her visits with these people.

On Sunday January 8th, she posted a black and white photo of a toddler holding on to his mother’s finger and trying to climb over a fairly large log across the path. Even from behind, his body posture shows him struggling, holding his little digging stick in his right hand in the effort to climb over the obstacle.

She also posted on Sunday three “then and now” photos, of adults during her most recent visit, who were children during her visits in 1996 and 1999. Particularly appealing is a photo of a young man, eyKameng, who is shown a few weeks ago with a big smile, a proud young father with his son. The photo can be appreciated better in flickr. To the left of the photo on her blog we see the same man as a youth making some darts for his blowpipe.

On Thursday the 12th, Dr. Lye posted a brief video she made which reconstructs her visits to Batek campsites throughout the Kechau and Tembeling river valleys of Malaysia’s Pahang state while she was doing her initial fieldwork. She uses a trial version of Google Earth Pro to show the various campsites she visited from July 1995 to November 1996.

The Google Earth technology makes it appear almost like a video camera is moving over the Malaysian forest, hovering over each site that she visited. Lye intersperses in the midst of the moving Google Earth video some of the still photos she had taken of people and activities on the ground. It all takes 2 minutes and 38 seconds. The work creates an impression of forests that remain intact and people who still live within them.

Last Friday, the 13th, she posted four black and white pictures of kids, three of whom are climbing trees—skills, she says, that they learn early. When the children try to climb a tree that is too large, adults will simply shout at them.

She indicated in her email that when she has the time, she has numerous other photos to process and add to her flickr account and her blog, both of which are well worth revisiting frequently. From her many return visits with these people, we learn that the Batek traditional culture is surviving fairly well. In addition to her 18 months of field work, Dr. Lye has revisited them in 1998, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2010, and, most recently, 2011-2012. She wrote that she plans to keep going back. Great news.

The Teesta River system is one of the biodiversity hotspots of India, and local Lepcha residents in the river valleys are agitating to stop the construction of dams that will destroy their ecosystem. Lingthen Gongthing, a Lepcha shaman, warns that “damming the Teesta, messing with her trajectory, arresting her flow, will cause a lot of destruction.” The Teesta drains much of the small north Indian state of Sikkim and, crucially, the eastern slopes of Mt. Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world and a sacred spot for the Lepcha.

A filmmaker and leader of the environmental group Affected Citizens of Teesta, Dawa Lepcha, told a reporter last week that the construction work for building the projected dams, tunnels, and power plants in the Dzongu Reserve, the sacred heart of the Lepcha territory, “will have a profound impact on the environment.” A former forest minister of Sikkim, Athup Lepcha, believes that the short-sighted degradation of the environment will affect everyone, and will undermine the economic foundation of the entire society. Perhaps it will even destroy the ability of humans to survive, he fears.

Kachyo Lepcha, a university lecturer and storyteller, asks a very simple question: “Why can’t India spare [the] Dzongu? How many such places are left in our country?” His question is based on the rich biodiversity of the state. According to an article last week summarizing the arguments of the dam opponents, 50 percent of the invertebrate and vertebrate species in India live in Sikkim, one third of which are endemics. That is, they are species that occur nowhere else in the world.

While the focus of much environmental activism of the past was on so-called charismatic megafauna, such as elephants and tigers, the issue now is to try and protect all of the interdependent communities of flora and fauna, including humans, which are seriously threatened by large, destructive construction projects. The 24 big dams planned for the Teesta River system would seriously threaten the interdependent web of life in the mountains and valleys.

Another serious issue is that weather patterns are changing rapidly, which threatens to decrease snowfall and rapidly shrink the glaciers in the eastern Himalayas. The article claims that the temperatures in northeastern India are likely to increase by 1.8 to 2.1 degrees Celsius (3.24 to 3.78 degrees Fahrenheit) in just the next 20 years.

The third major problem is the danger of earthquakes. Predicted by some scientists due to the tunneling and dam construction, the large quake last September may well have been the result of human activity. Geologists may not be able to predict exactly when or where earthquakes will occur after humans disturb the bedrock, but the construction might have prompted the earthquake.

Human-induced earthquakes have been occurring in the Northeastern U.S. A year-long series of minor quakes occurred last year in northeastern Ohio, apparently caused by the high-pressure injection of waste fluids used in hydraulic fracturing deep into the earth. The series was topped by a 4.0 earthquake which rattled Youngstown two weeks ago, on New Year’s Eve. Industry representatives of course denied any possible connection with their work, but the evidence suggested that the injections were probably the cause. The same sort of thing may have happened in Sikkim. In any event, Ohio officials at the beginning of last week stopped the industry from injecting the fluids into the disposal wells.

There is also a spiritual level to the debate in Sikkim. The bongthings, the Lepcha shamans, had warned that the gods of Kanchenjunga were angry about the destruction that people were doing on the flanks of the mountain. Whether the spirit of the great mountain was sufficiently angered, or whether the earthquake was purely a geological phenomenon, probably depends on ones religious perspective. Some Lepcha point to the fact that the number of deaths in the mining camps and construction tunnels during the earthquake indicates the displeasure of the gods.

Whatever the causes of the earthquake may have been, even Lepcha residents of Sikkim, who had previously accepted the assurances by the state government and the pro-dam advocates, suddenly began to have serious doubts. The benign goodness of the dams has been rejected by most Lepcha due to what has happened. Kanchenjunga appears to be wiser than the officials.

Igloolik Isuma Productions, the company that explored Inuit conceptions of evil, violence and forgiveness with the award-winning film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, has filed for bankruptcy. The company had borrowed $750,000 from an accounting firm in Montreal and it can’t repay the debt. This has put their entire film archive into the hands of a receiver which, in the words of Norman Cohn, the Atanarjuat co-producer, “has no stake and no interest in the cultural value of the company or of the materials.”

An article in the Globe and Mail reviews the sad decline of Inuit filmmaking in the context of a review of a new, two volume boxed set of DVDs released by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) called Unikkausivut: Sharing Our Stories. Despite the international attention that Zacharias Kunuk earned for his haunting film about Atanarjuat, funding for Inuit filmmaking overall has remained very scarce.

The boxed set includes films which portray Inuit life for over seventy years, from the anthropological works of the 1940s, with their sometimes patronizing portrayals, up to the last two decades when the Inuit began to tell their own stories. Inuit film makers hoped the recognition that Atanarjuat gained—it won the Camera d’or prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000—would lead to increased funding for other Inuit film producers.

It hasn’t happened . An Inuit filmmaker from Winnipeg, Jeremy Torrie, said he “thought the floodgates would open, as far as Canadian broadcasters and distributors wanting to embrace another perspective.” But a decade after the famous film, nothing has changed and the funding remains sparse.

Producing films in the North presents special problems. Broadcasters and distributors are not inclined to take on films that, they perceive, have little market potential. Broadcasters are normally only willing to fund documentaries or short works, which discourages the production of feature-length films. And the actual filming can present technical difficulties, compounded by a lack of capable technicians and proper equipment. Also, funding for film making may seem to be irrelevant when so many other needs appear to be more compelling.

The Globe and Mail liked the films in the boxed DVD set, some of which “are often poignant and revelatory.” A 1967 documentary “Stalking Seal on the Spring Ice” portrays the considerable skills of seal hunters of the day, while a 2003 film “If the Weather Permits” shows how those skills have been lost.

James Roberts, an official at the NFB who assisted in the release of the boxed set, said that the Inuit filmmakers “are capturing a way of life and commenting on what we would refer to as the bravery or adaptability of the people of the North [who have] to live in such harsh conditions.”

The review concludes that “the collection presents a fascinating portrait of the land, the people and the whole art form of filmmaking itself.” Another commentator, the chief executive of Nunavut Film, David Mazur, argues that there is hope for Inuit filmmaking because of the growth of online distribution. He feels that Canadians do have an appetite for films about the Arctic, and that Inuit works are still being sold around the world.

Juan Santiago, a young Zapotec leader in central California, believes that traditions of community service, which are so important in the villages of Oaxaca, need to revived among the immigrant communities in the Golden State.

Although the Zapotec migrants used to be able to cross the border and return to their home villages in Mexico to celebrate their major festivals, increased border security has made this very difficult. So they are starting to celebrate their festivals in Madera, a city in the San Joaquin Valley and home to many Zapotec people.

After Christmas last month, for the third year in a row, Mr. Santiago and the other local Zapotec leaders organized a festival to honor St. John the Evangelist, the patron saint of Coatecas Altas, the town in Oaxaca where many of them come from. Zapotec people from across California and from as far away as Oregon and Washington visited Madera to help celebrate the saint’s day. The festival coincided with the one being held in the town in Oaxaca.

Santiago, a 23-year old student at California State University in Fresno, started the festival as a way of helping organize the Zapotec people. Most of his own family are farm workers, and he is the first to graduate from high school and to attend a university.

Sara Lara Flores, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University in Mexico, said that before the 1980s, the Zapotec migrated to the Los Angeles metropolitan area to find work. But in recent decades, the Zapotec have migrated farther north, to the central California farms to get field work.

Out of the 61,416 people in Madera, according to the 2010 census, 47,103, or 76.7 percent, are Hispanics. The Zapotec people, about 5,000 in the city, have a double language barrier: they have to learn both Spanish and English, in addition to their own native Zapotec. Young Zapotec people are born into poverty, have little opportunity to get an education, have few opportunities since they have no legal papers, and are often paid less than other workers.

After calling the first Zapotec meeting in Madera and being elected president of the group, Juan Santiago argued that community work should give their young people something positive to do. It encourages leadership and is generally productive for them, he feels. Flores agrees that community service is an essential ingredient for the health of the immigrant community.

The celebration of the saint’s day last week was part of that effort. Flores commented, “this celebration allows for the ties of solidarity and mutual help that characterize indigenous people to be reinforced. It helps them face the atmosphere of hostility and intolerance that many encounter.”

The day started with over 1,000 Zapotec attending mass. The festival then included a basketball tournament, a run from Madera to Fresno (about 22 miles), and a variety of activities in a rented hall at the Madera Fairgrounds. There they prayed, lit candles, and placed bouquets of flowers in front of an image of St. John the Evangelist—which was made to look just like the one in Coatecas Altas.

Giant paper mache dolls danced around the hall under a ceiling decorated with banners hand cut into elaborate designs. Everyone received cups of tepache, a fermented pine apple beverage, and plates of mole. To conclude the festivities, Santiago handed ceremonial staffs to newly elected members of the steering committee who will exemplify community service for another three years.

Birhor women have traditionally collected the leaves from saal trees in northeastern India to use as dinner plates for their families, but they have recently been trained to also fabricate them into commercial products. Ratan Kumar, the Deputy Commissioner for the Lohardaga District of Jharkhand state, is taking credit for initiating the training project among a group of 25 Birhor women.

The leaves, taken from Shorea robustax, the saal tree—a member of the Dipterocarp family—have a long history of being used as plates for eating foods in northern and northeastern India. After being used as dinner plates, according to an article in the Wikipedia, the leaves are then fed to goats and cattle. The article adds that their use by rural people helps prevent the accumulation of litter from non-reusable Styrofoam and plastic plates.

Kumar persuaded the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), plus an NGO that is active in northeast India, the Chhotanagpur Craft and Development Society, to support his project. He wanted to train the Birhor women at the village of Semardih, in the Kisko block of his district, how to fabricate plates and bowls out of the forest leaves, and then how to market them. Mr. Kumar was encouraged when “the women of the primitive tribe had showed a great interest of doing something in my first interaction with them one month ago,” so he decided to move ahead with the project.

The Birhor women have traditionally gathered the saal leaves in the forest anyway, so the prospect of developing their normal occupation into a viable business had immediate appeal. The official admitted that previous projects in the village had failed because development planners had not considered the fact that the women would need careful training, and that machines run by electricity would not work in a village without any electrical power.

This time, the planners claim they have been more careful. The machines used for fabricating the plates are powered by firewood, and the training period for the women has been for 15 days, rather than the one day offered in an earlier project.

The Deputy Commissioner added that a variety of other district officials are being encouraged to pay special attention to the needs of the Birhor. Doctors have been asked to undertake monthly health checkups in the community. People have been given blankets. A community hall, long neglected, has been completed. Some individuals have been given ration cards, and medicated mosquito nets are expected to be provided to the villagers shortly.

A South Dakota Hutterite colony is planning to split in half and establish another one in North Dakota, but as sometimes happens, there has been opposition in the rural area where they plan to build the new one. The Bohnsack Township Board, in Traill County, ND, held a hearing about the application by the Millbrook Colony, located near Mitchell, SD, to build the new development, which will be called the Spruce Lane Colony. The township board approved the application.

About 20 people were in attendance, a large crowd for a rural North Dakota township meeting, but an earlier session, on November 17th, had attracted 120. They evidently came from all over the county, attracted by the controversy over the Hutterite plans for the land they have purchased. The newspaper article about the controversy did not indicate if any of the North Dakota residents had traveled the 250 miles south to actually visit the existing Millbrook Colony and see for themselves what the people, and the colony, are like.

The opponents of the Hutterite colony, calling themselves “Residents for a Greener Traill,” hired a lawyer to represent them at the hearings. Attorney Jade Rosenfels told the township meeting that their opposition has nothing to do with the applicants themselves. The opponents are only concerned about the planned uses of the land. They say they want to preserve the rural character of the area.

Mike Waldner, project leader for the new Spruce Lane Colony, indicated that it is quite common for Hutterite colonies to split when their populations become too large. Colonies typically own around 4,000 acres and have at maximum about 20 families. He told the meeting that that amounts to about 200 acres per family. “So, we’re not land robbers,” he said. He added that they have already purchased 2,100 acres in North Dakota for the new colony.

The Hutterites plan to build an 80,000 square foot manufacturing plant on their property to build grain handling equipment, especially conveyors. They will also build residences for themselves, a dining hall, a church, a school, and a barn for chickens and ducks. Their farming operation will include corn, beans, and wheat.

Area residents are concerned about the planned sewage lagoon, which will be only an eighth of a mile from Elm River. They also worry about pollution from the manufacturing plant. Also, some people have been opposed because of a misunderstanding that the Hutterites would not pay taxes, which is not true.

John Henn, the township chairman, said that the colony had met all zoning requirements, so the board had no other choice than to approve the application. “But I think this is a good thing..” he said. “They’ll be good neighbors. And their tax dollars will go to the school district.”

Mr. Waldener, the Hutterite leader, spoke in a conciliatory fashion. “Their concerns are very understandable,” he said. “With every new colony, there are always concerns. It’s just hard for people to accept change. It’s a big change for this area.”

With a typical can-do attitude, some Amish families in Sturkie, Arkansas, decided to erect a new bridge to overcome the fact that their small community was divided by the South Fork River.

Arkansas Amish community Moses Borntrager, on whose land the proposed construction was to take place, learned that an old steel bridge had been replaced by a new one up in Mendon, Missouri, 306 miles to the north, and it was sitting in a field of the farmer who had bought it for scrap. “If we’d known what we were getting into, we may not have done it,” Borntrager admitted as he surveyed the completed job recently.

Leaders in the Sturkie Amish community were able to buy the old bridge and hire a company from the town of Ash Flat, Arkansas, to move it to Mr. Borntrager’s property. There, Amish helpers cut the bridge down from 18 feet to 12 feet wide, and they welded in steel beams to lengthen it from its original 70 feet to the 92 feet necessary to span the river. It took 65 hours of welding to get the bridge exactly right for its new home.

The Amish poured 40 cubic yards of concrete for the bridge to sit on. Then Paul Carter, from Cave City, AR, used his crane to haul the bridge across Borntrager’s pasture to the edge of the river. With workers holding ropes and helping maneuver it into place, Carter’s crane struggled to move the bridge onto its new supports. He admitted the structure was quite heavy for his crane, but he finished the job successfully.

Another local contractor built a road across the pasture and ramps up to the bridge to provide access from the public road. Another Amishman, John Shetler, cut 12 tons of lumber at his sawmill from trees on Amish property for the bridge decking.

State representative Lori Benedict, who lives in the area, expressed support for the project. “I’ve tried it out a couple of times,” she said about the bridge. “They did a great job as usual.”

Rep. Benedict has cited the growth of the Amish community in her arguments with the U.S. Postal Service opposing a proposal to close the Sturkie post office. She is defensive of Amish interests and envisions a future tourist draw from having them living and prospering in her district. She argues that it would be a bad idea to make them travel six and a half miles to the post office in the larger town of Salem.

The Amish are evidently expanding the businesses in the area. Mr. Borntrager makes harnesses, while other Amish families manage a country store, operate a blacksmith shop, make cabinets, and grow produce.

Peaceful Societies

Peaceful Societies

Nubians Chafe under Egyptian Military Rule

Amish Supporters Look for Creative Compromises

Difficulties of an Isolated Doctor

New Photos of the Batek

Wisdom of the Sacred Mountain

Inuit Filmmaking Struggles

Zapotec Festival in Central California

Birhor Leaves for Dinner Plates

New Hutterite Colony Stirs Opposition

Constructive Spirit in an Arkansas Amish Community

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