Amish expand in Latin America,Canada

THE AMISH,  religious communities that reject aspects of modern life are expanding, with two new colonies in Latin America and one in Canada in the last year.

The sect has growing membership and a high percentage of young people are choosing to remain within the communities. The total population is about 308,000, a growth of 18% in the last five years, according to research of the Center for Anabaptist Studies and Pietists of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

The two settlements in South America were founded last year after the former Mennonite communities in those countries met  with the Amish in North America to assess the possibility of combining said Steven Nolt, who helped coordinate demographic research.

The Mennonite groups who are conservative and whose roots go back to immigrants who mpved from Russia to Canada in the nineteenth century, left Canada in the 1920s because of a dispute about the need to teach English to their children, and came to Mexico and other parts of Latin America, Nolt said.

In recent years, members of the sect in Bolivia and Argentina have suffered financial problems and social isolation, and wrote to an Amish  publishing house in Canada and eventually contacted an New Order Amish group in Ohio that allows members, under certain circumstances, to make air travel.

After leading Ohio Amish Country, to visit  South America, they dispatched two families to settle there and create communities that could be incorporated with  Mennonites.

Amish Americans usually do not proselytize or do missionary work but  they have  sent teams to  communities assist in construction projects.

The community in Bolivia, known as the Colonia Naranjita, is  about 120 kilometers southwest of Santa Cruz, while the colony in northwestern Argentina is in a rural area east of Catamarca. “This is something new and different that illustrates an unusual strategy to acquire new Amish  members “estimated Nolt.

He said that the Mennonite men in these areas have started to grow a beard like the Amish, and Amish Ohio woman has begun to knit typical hats  to give  to their new colleagues.