Strangers, pimples and hormones. Coming home from her first day of middle school in a new town, my kid sister was, as she would say, a little freaked out. One would expect the comforts of home to put most tensions at ease. However, we had just moved into a new house in a new town and with most of our belongings still in boxes, our house didn’t yet feel like home. Beat, my little sister plopped herself down on the couch, stabbed through a Juicy Juice and tried to relax to some Cosby Show.

A few episodes later, the fall evening began to grow dark, and my sister wondered where my parents were.

Impatience set in. When our doorbell rang, my sister jumped up in joy and ran to our front door to welcome our parents back to their new home. Before opening the door, she playfully peered through the peephole, like any smart adolescent girl who is home alone at night should do.

But, she didn’t see my parents. Instead, she saw a lone tall man, dressed in a long black cloak and a top hat. The man carried a large sack and, like my sister, was looking into the peephole himself, leaning his body against our front door. My sister jumped back, blinked hard and looked through the peephole again. There stood the man, ringing the doorbell repeatedly while my sister stood literally feet away from him inside.

Ignoring the shady fellow, my sister returned to Dr. Huxtable and the couch. Doorbell rings desperately turned into repeated knocks and my sister, home alone in an empty house in a new town, became understandably fearful. Getting up to go to the kitchen, she looked through our front living room window to see the tall, dark man peering inside with his face and hands pressed up against the glass.

My sister turned the corner into the kitchen and cowered behind the fridge. She rubbernecked around the fridge several times only to find the man staring through different windows of the house — from the dining room to the front door to the living room — now knocking on the glass and grumbling inaudibly. If he knocks any harder, she thought, he’ll break right through the window.

She called 911.

The police and my parents arrived at the same time. The man was pacing back and forth in front of our house and warmly greeted the police officers and my parents. In front of the house he had a horse-drawn buggy parked. He introduced himself as Jacob, slowly reached into his sack and asked my parents and the officer if they would like to buy some apple pie.

Jacob was Amish. The officer gently made it clear that soliciting required a permit and was not allowed after dark. Jacob profusely apologized and promised he would never come back to our neighborhood.

Lancaster County, Penn. is brimming with Amish folk. Before my family moved to Lancaster, my perception of the Amish was limited to Weird Al Yankovic’s song “Amish Paradise,” a parody of Coolio’s 1995 hit “Gangster’s Paradise.” In the music video (check it out on YouTube), Weird Al and his Amish friends are shown churning butter, demolishing electronics and wearing sundials on their wrists. Weird Al raps over Coolio’s beat with clever lines such as, “We ain’t really quaint, so please don’t point and stare / we’re just technologically impaired.”

Visiting home during vacations, I’ve had the opportunity to learn about and interact with a number of Amish people, about 50,000 of which live in and around Lancaster County. As I expected, Amish are very peaceful, humble and friendly folks. They are very industrious; they live almost entirely off of the land and by hand they raise, reap, sow, sew and build almost everything they use for survival. They have a sense of humor, are quite sociable and are family-oriented. Young Amish men are required to shave daily until they marry; afterwards they are required to grow and keep a beard for the rest of their lives. Amish kids, boys with plain black trousers, suspenders and straw hats and girls with little blue dresses and bonnets, are really, really cute.

Aside from my personal interactions, perhaps the most illustrative example of the Amish’s attitude and way of life is shown by a tragic event that occurred last year. In October 2006, a gunman took hostage and killed five young girls and himself in an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County. Being held up by the gunman, the oldest victim, 13-year-old Marian Fisher, asked Roberts to shoot her first in an effort to spare the younger girls. Marian and four other girls were found dead at the scene, many with dozens of bullet wounds to the head and neck. The school has since been bulldozed and in its place remains a quiet pasture.

The response of the Amish community was complete forgiveness. One of the grandfathers of the victims publicly stated about Roberts, “We must not think evil of this man.” Hours after the tragedy unfolded, the Amish reached out to Roberts’ family and have since established a charitable fund for the family of the murderer.

It is hard to imagine a more peaceful and constructive response from a devastated community.

Ever since Jacob banished himself from our neighborhood, my mom now often goes knocking on their doors, wondering if they have any apple pie to sell.

Behzad Varamini is a graduate student in Nutritional Sciences. He can be contacted at bv29@cornell.edu. Gain Through Loss appears alternate Wednesdays.