Central College

International Club

Home

Activity Calendar

Constitution

Month:  Jan  Feb  Mar  Apr  May  Jun  Jul  Aug  Sep  Oct  Nov  Dec

Activity Calendar

     Every student at Central is welcome to these meetings and parties.  If you want to check out our activities in each month, please see the Upcoming News page.

Photo Album

Date: April 2004

Info: A trip to Kalona where it has Amish tradition.  Very good experience for international students.

Title: Trip To Kalona, written by Minyao Jiang

           "The Amish”, a new word for most foreign students, have been one of the very unique groups existing in American society.  I did not hear of this group of people until I was taking a religion class which talked about the Amish community.  Ever since the class, I have been interested in the Amish people.  Most international students, have come from different cultural backgrounds and have heard many stories about the cultural struggling others have faced in the US.  The Amish, a group of people who have protected themselves from the outside world so well, have raised interest in foreign students like us.  So when we got an opportunity, we all wanted to go and take a look at their life.  This Saturday, we had a trip to an Amish family to observe some of their life styles.  With our great curiosities, we drove to a family which lived near a town called Kalona in southeast Iowa.

            The car wandered around some small roads where not many houses were around.  Some red and white houses appeared as we went into those roads.  Some horse-cars were running on the gravel road, on the top was sitting an Amish dressed man, staring at our car.  When we got further into the roads, fewer houses were spread around.  At the same time, we saw Amish kids were chasing each other along the street or sitting in the swing and playing.  Some younger kids looked at our car with curiosity; older kids ignored our car and went on with their jobs; some younger adults or older people stared at us with indifferent looks on their faces, which didn’t seem very welcoming to me.  I suddenly had a very strange feeling that I was an invader.  I felt like I had disturbed someone’s life without asking and became very uncomfortable.

            Finally, we stopped in front of a red and white house which looked just like the ones along the road.  An old lady came out and took us into this house.  The first impact of the house was not very surprising.  It looked like the same as what we usually see.  However, when we examined the rooms closer, we found out that there were no electric lights hanging on the wall.  Carlyn, our director, told us that this is a family restaurant so that they have a toilet in their house which flushes.  Usually, Amish people do not have toilets in their homes.  A big ten-seated table, where ten sets of dishes were placed beforehand, was in the middle of the dinning room.  The old lady’s husband was sitting in the kitchen, reading a newspaper.  We were trying to start small conversations with them.  The old lady seemed very shy and most of time, she just smiled and listened, nodding or shaking her head occasionally to answer our questions.  Her husband did not seem interested in our topics at all.  He looked down at the table and read his newspaper all the time.  His paper was an Amish newspaper which contained news of all the Amish communities around the US.  Again, I had the feeling that I had done something really wrong to disturb somebody’s life.  Their silence seemed like a way to isolate themselves from the outside world.  The meal was great and we liked the food very much.  However, during the whole meal, I was disappointed that we did not get the chance to talk to this old couple.  Right after the meal, the lady brought us a little notebook where there were the signatures of all the people they had served.  The lady explained to us that they asked people for their messages when they left.  I looked at her surprisingly, and realized that it was not that they did not want to talk to people, maybe it was just because it was the way they were for so many years without talking to other people who lived outside of their community.  And then I understood that it was their way to protect their own culture not being corrupted by the modern fast-developing world.  I do not know if it is a good way to do it, but it is their choice and they are happy with it.  Just like most international students, we are trying to maintain our own culture while at the same time we come here to learn a different culture.  We cannot say that they are doing things the wrong way, but we are definitely going through the same things as they do.  When we drove back to school, we saw that the Amish family and some regular American families were living next to each other.  Their houses were just by each other.  There is no inside or outside, the only difference is cultural.