The Budget newspaper carries news from Anabaptist communities around the world. (Photo by 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 microscope 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 18th 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:
Then at the end of this column, another animal became a main character in a story about a benefit auction:
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:
In contrast, in Nashville, Arkansas, the scribe didn’t have such a good experience with the wind:
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:
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 Feb. 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:
On Feb. 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:
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 16th 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.
This column is republished from Mary Swanders’ Buggy Land, through the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.
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Mary Swander