GROWING UP AMISH
Emma Gingerich on leaving the community
It’s all she had ever known. At 18 Emma Gingerich had grown up without electricity or water in her home. She had not watched TV or been online. She’d never been in a car. She wasn’t even allowed buttons on her clothes. It makes her escape from the Amish community she’d been born into even more remarkable.“i knew I was different from an early age,” Gingerich tells WHO. “I felt ashamed and guilty for wanting more and I couldn’t understand why I was having these thoughts.”
The now 30-year-old from Dallas, Texas, spent her childhood and teenage years in one of the most conservative sects in the world. The Swartzentruber Amish shun modern life, refusing to speak English and governing the lives of its community with a raft of strict rules. “I asked my parents why I always had to wear a dress,” Gingerich says, describing the heavy, plain dress of a specified length. “They told me it wasn’t ladylike to wear pants. Mainly things were just accepted as the rules, though. When I asked why I couldn’t travel in a car they didn’t have an answer.”
From age seven to 14 Gingerich’s thirst for knowledge was satisfied by a basic education. “We learnt to read and write but there was no history, science or geography,” she remembers. And it was when her schooling finished, with no chance of furthering her education, that Gingerich’s thoughts first turned to escape. “I never shared them with anyone,” she admits. “I didn’t know who to trust. I would have been in a lot of trouble.”
After years of turning the idea over in her mind Gingerich wondered if settling might be the easy option. “I thought I should start dating and trying to be a proper Amish woman,” she explains.
In the end, it was that which tipped her over the edge. “A guy was brought to my bedroom at 11 PM,” she says, explaining the Amish dating system. “No sexual contact is allowed. You talk or lie in bed together. For six months the same guy came every two weeks but we never spoke. I was too nervous. I didn’t know what was expected of me. Then I realised I didn’t feel like I was supposed to be Amish.”
Instead of marrying the man, as expected after the courtship, Gingerich told him he didn’t have to come back again and he never did. Not long after, she found the courage to tell a non-amish couple who visited her community that she wanted to get out.
“Initially, they said they couldn’t help me but a few weeks later the woman handed me a note with a phone number on it,” Gingerich says. “She told me to call it when I decided to leave. I carried that number with me everywhere for two months.”
And then one morning in 2006, the 18-year-old Gingerich decided today was the day. “I left my parents a note saying goodbye and I walked four miles to the nearest town. I had no idea who I was ringing but I called the number on the paper and the lady who answered came to pick me up.”
It turns out, “Kate,” as Gingerich calls her, was an Amish escapee, too, and over the next few weeks she supported the teenager as she made her way into what was a completely alien world. “The biggest surprise was that we had a president,” Gingerich smiles. “I’d had no idea how the country was run.”
Shockingly she also experienced rape at the hands of a man who befriended her but, because she had no idea what sex was, she didn’t realise until much later that what he’d done was wrong.
“That time was harder than I ever imagined,” Gingerich tells WHO. “I was trying to adapt and I was homesick. When I eventually visited my family, they were so angry. My dad said the devil had got hold of me and I was part of the devil’s family now.”
Being estranged from her parents is something Gingerich has had to accept, and over the years she has focused on bettering herself with a degree, an MBA and now a job in a hospital. She also has a partner and in 2014 she wrote her book, The Runaway Amish Girl: The Great Escape, which has attracted worldwide attention.
“When I wrote the book I would have been happy if a few of my friends in Texas read it. I never dreamed it would go international!” Gingerich says. “Now I get messages every day from people, all types of people, saying I have inspired them. The book had a bigger purpose than I thought and I believe I’m living the life I should be living.”
It has been 12 years since Gingerich left the Amish, and she says she has no regrets. “I miss my mum and wish I could have a relationship with my nieces and nephews but I have peace. I could not live that lifestyle and feel blessed to be where I am today.”
“When I eventually visited my family, they were so angry”