Runaway Amish Girl: The Great Escape

With the romanticized imaginations of many, conjectured stereotypical analyses are common among people such as "communities deliver a sense of identity"; "communities satisfy our desires," and "communities respect and encourage exploration of individuality." Nevertheless, countless people, including Catherine Latterell, author of Remix (Reading and Composing Culture), can also agree that it’s not always reality. Often our perceptions become distorted on certain matters by worldviews obtained from social media and secondary literature. In her book, she illustrates this by providing her readers with references to articles, written by average citizens, that tell of their experiences and knowledge about distinctive communities and how they genuinely …show more content…
Reasoning with herself one-day, she said, “all of a sudden something changed, and I just didn’t feel like I belonged there anymore. Curious about the outside world, I longed for more,” and a couple of weeks later she was gone. Twenty-seven now, Gingerich lives in Arlington, Texas, where she worked at a hospital as a billing coordinator and went back to school to attain her MBA. However, she was consequently cut off from her family; although, when she contemplated on what it would be like if she would never have escaped, she recognized she had made the best decision. Now she goes to the evangelical Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas. When Amish, she objected to being baptized, but now she had made the decision to be baptized. Amish share similar Christian beliefs, accentuating simplicity, separation from the world and the authority of the local church. But, Gingerich explained that to be baptized in the church is to consent to the Ordnung including, the long skirts, the bonnets, and the rules she didn’t comprehend. And it would have resulted in shunning if she didn’t obey these guidelines. “Here, I got baptized for the right reason – because I believe in Jesus – and nobody was telling me, ‘Well, if you get baptized, you have to wear a long dress and keep your hair under a bonnet," Gingerich said. Considering how challenging her journey has been, she’s putting in some effort to be more vulnerable and honest and how the pain and suffering were all worth it. Finally, she concluded her interview with an inspiring choice of words, saying, “There is a way to allow yourself to grieve over something, and there’s a time to pick yourself up from that and move