Rumspringa

What is up with this? They say it is going to snow today, in mid-April, and they are right.

Luckily, I had no reason to leave the house. H__ had been quite ill the past few days, and now has a week-long visitor. I took advantage of this opportunity to become domestic and do my laundry and ironing, and to watch a documentary entitled Devil's Playground.

The film was different from what I expected, though after seeing it, it is hard to recall what I was expecting. It is a philosophical meditation on what it means to have to make a life-altering decision at the age of 16. Amish children are allowed to venture out into the "English world" at that age, to discover the world of electricity, malls, cars, music and drugs. They are given a period, referred to as "rumspringa", to decide whether or not they want to join the Amish church. If they join, they are baptized and taken in to the community. If, for some reason, a tragedy would befall and Amish teen who has not made their decision, the Amish believe that their soul will be lost forever.

The film adequately captures the difficulty of making an unchangeable decision about the rest of your life as a teenager. The teens are portrayed in all their wildness, given their first taste of the modern world and "freedom", yet they are also surprisingly philosophical and understandably overwhelmed and confused at the task ahead of them.

This is a little film, but one that will make you think about many things that we take for granted and never question. Maybe we should.