c. 2006 Religion News Service

NICKEL MINES, Pa. _ The young woman was exhausted. In the span of a few hours, she had dealt intimately with both birth and the consequences of unexpected death.

“Strange,” said Maribeth Diver. “Life and death, like that, all in the same day. So much joy, so much sorrow.”

She is a nurse/midwife, 28, a transplant from Seattle who searched the country for a place where she could practice what she believes in, home deliveries of babies.

What the Old Order Amish have done in this place for centuries.

“It’s not a suspicion of modern medicine,” says Diver, who is not Amish. “They’ll go to the hospital if they need to. It’s just part of a life that is centered in the home, in the family.”

The other day, a man with demons in his head _ some related to the death almost 10 years ago of another newborn baby, his daughter Elise _ shot 10 Amish girls. So far five have died.

On that same day, in places close enough to have heard the echoes of gunshots over these green rolling hills, Diver delivered two babies.

“I knew about what happened, and so did the moms,” she says. “We were obviously upset about it.”

But birth is part of life, just as death is, and Diver says the horrible news that spread quickly without telephones and television did not interfere with what had to be done.

“Amish women are the most practical women in the world,” Diver says. “They were both focused on what they needed to do. And when the babies came, they were happy. They were new life.”

Home birth is a tradition in this tradition-bound area, and so is midwifery. But where Diver works _ a place with the simple, obvious name The Birth Center _ is more than just a place where Amish women come to have their pregnancies guided.

That was especially obvious in the last few days.

“We mediated between them and a confusing world,” says Rita Rhoads, founder of The Birth Center, a state-licensed health care facility. She is Mennonite, a member of a sect related to the Amish but not as severe in its enforced plainness. She wears a purple sweater and only the trace of a bonnet. She drives a car and uses a cell phone.

“It’s just a matter of how we approach modern culture,” says Rhoads, a nurse and businesswoman who received a graduate degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The Birth Center is near the one-room schoolhouse where the shootings happened. Diver was driving from a visit to a woman near term Monday when she saw the state police cars converge on White Oak Road. She heard the roar of helicopters overhead.

“I saw a woman in the road and stopped the car,” says Diver. “I asked what happened. She said there had been a shooting at the school.”

By the time Diver arrived at The Birth Center, someone had come in with the frightening news. Diver called Rhoads.

Rhoads, 52, grew up in this area and has worked here as a midwife since 1978. She knows nearly everyone in a place that relies far more on personal contact than any other form of communication.

She went to the site and learned the injured girls had been taken to the local Bart Township volunteer fire station, about halfway between the school and The Birth Center. It was where triage was done.

“The families started to come there,” says Rhoads. The children were sent to four different hospitals, including one in Delaware.

She and her staff helped arrange travel to the hospitals so the parents and other relatives could be with their children. Transportation here is by buggy, but that obviously wouldn’t work well now.

“It’s a time when people who are usually so self-sufficient do need help negotiating with a world unlike the one they know,” says Rhoads.

Meanwhile, back at The Birth Center, the demands of life and birth continued. Shortly after 5 p.m., Diver delivered a baby girl at the facility, which has three birthing rooms. A few hours later, a neighbor came to the center to say another woman had gone into labor.

That little girl was born at home, on her parents’ nearby farm, shortly before midnight of the worst day most people in this area could remember.

“A circle,” says Diver.

In the days following the massacre, Rhoads and other neighbors coordinated help for the affected families. Got them what they needed. Got the work done the men and the women couldn’t do because they were with their hurt and sometimes dying children in strange places like Philadelphia and Wilmington.

“They were sad and they were crying,” Rhoads says of the parents she visited. “But they were not hysterical, not out of control. That wouldn’t be their way.”

Rhoads, too, stayed very much in control. Except when she mentioned three of the girls who died. The three she personally delivered in their homes here.

“Sorry,” she said, briefly turning away. “They were mine.”

KRE/PH END BRAUN

(Bob Braun is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.) Editors: To obtain a photo of Rhodes, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.