Breaking Amish: Emma Gingerich

May 04--She dates guys with motorcycles. She listens to rap and classic rock. She's working on her master's degree in business.

She grew up Amish.

Emma Gingerich lived in Amish communities in Ohio and Missouri for the first 18 years of her life, and then woke up one day when no one was around and walked into a new life. It was a life she knew nothing about.

"The reason I left was because I didn't like the rules," said Gingerich, now 26. "I was just very unhappy and unsettled in the way my life was going."

She was living with her family in Eagleville, Missouri, when she told someone from the "outside" who visited the community frequently that she wanted to leave. He gave her a phone number to a family who would take her in.

But leaving wasn't that easy. Her parents and neighbors couldn't be there when she left, because there would have been a major altercation and they may even have physically prevented her from leaving, she said. She had to patiently wait until the right moment. That moment came in January of 2006.

She walked away from the community with nothing but the clothes on her back and $50 she'd saved over the years. She walked four miles and called the number she'd been given and waited outside a bank. Someone drove up and asked if she was Emma. She said yes and they took her to their home where she stayed for two weeks.

They happened to know Noel Wiley of Harlingen who often did business in the area buying, selling and training horses.

"I came to South Texas (Harlingen) to the Wiley's place and not really thinking I'd stay there but I ended up staying there for four years," she said.

After being gone for four weeks, she wrote her family from Texas. And she heard back.

"My brother wrote me and my mom wrote me and my dad wrote me," she said. "Within the first month I had gotten seven to eight letters from people, my brother and my parents. They were all telling me I'm making a mistake. That I'm going to end up somewhere I don't want to me. And that God won't accept me like that."

Her first really big hurdle was catching up with her education. Amish children only go to school through the eighth grade, she said. With people there to support her and guide her through the process, she got to work.

"As soon as I got to Texas I worked on my GED," she said. "I studied religiously. I went and took the test and passed the first time, and then I took some test to get into college. I think it was the ACT that I took."

She then attended Texas State Technical College in Harlingen where she earned an associate's degree in agriculture technology.

"I picked that because it was something I was a little bit familiar with, but still it was nothing like I expected," she said. "Girls in my community aren't allowed to be outside that much and doing farm work."

Although the course work at TSTC was nothing like she expected, she nevertheless enjoyed it and transferred to Tarleton State University near Stephenville and graduated with a bachelor's degree in crop science in 2012.

She's now looking forward to completing here MBA. She'd like to work in a hospital doing insurance billing.

"I like helping people so I might do some volunteer work at the hospital," she said.

She does go home to visit. Her family lives in Maine now. The elders look down on her, she said. The relationship with her family has been difficult. She does have several cousins in Iowa who've left the Amish community and she communicates with them.

Nevertheless, she doesn't regret growing up Amish.

"I think it's a great place to grow up Amish," she said. "You learn about family values and you learn to be honest and a hard worker. But I definitely wouldn't want to go back just because I couldn't take all the rules. Their church system I didn't like. I had to be in church almost all day Sunday."

She said she attends a nondenominational church but doesn't consider herself religious. However, some of the positive qualities of her Amish upbringing are still with her.

"I would say I'm humble and down to earth just like I was as an Amish," she said. "I'm just more modern now, that's all."

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