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Published: August 20th 2007
I prayed for rain, and by jove I got it!
On Tuesday the Team and I went to Kamashi, which is a five hour drive, the last hour of which is spent climbing a mountain…nerve-wracking! The purpose of this trip was to do some books out of the Ruhi Institute with the Baha’i community there. For those of you who don’t know, the Ruhi Institute is made up of a series of seven books which are studied as an ordered sequence, each book discussing a different topic to do with spirituality and the Baha’i Faith. I feel like I’ve explained this before…hmmm, I will have to check my older blog entries. Anyway, on our last trip to Kamashi (with Chris, which I described in an entry which was lost during the recent server crash), I discussed the idea of a return trip to do Ruhi books with the community, and they all liked the idea. We chose Book 1 (Reflections on the Life of the Spirit) and Book 4 (The Twin Manifestations, which covers some basic Baha’i history). The number of participants was guessed at about 5-10 for Book 1 and 5 for Book 4. So on this trip I
brought 10 Book 1’s and 5 Book 4’s. Oooohhhh MAN! was I unprepared!
What happened was six people showed up for Book 4 (not a big problem, one of them was illiterate and therefore didn’t need a book), and none of the originally planned 5-10 people showed up for Book 1. However, an English teacher named Emmanuel from a nearby secondary school said that he had a few students interested in doing Book 1. “A few” turned out to be over 50!!! Needless to say, we did NOT have enough books for them all. So what we did was we told them to share the books and write down their answers in exercise books (the books are made up of sections, in each section an idea or a quote is studied and then questions about the idea/quote are answered).
Another problem (and this one is really my fault): it started raining on Wednesday. I got my rain, and when I got it, I got A LOT of it! OK, not a huge problem, just move all the groups inside (one group studying Book 4 and three groups of students doing Book 1). Yeah, the Baha’i Center in Kamashi is certainly
RED DEER!!!!!
Its so strange to be walking through a tiny village in the middle of the wild African Boonies and see a kid wearing a shirt that advertises a city only a few hours from Calgary. Small world!!not the smallest one I’ve seen, but it’s pretty close. 50-some students, 6 Book 4 people plus myself and my team, all stuffed into a small Baha’i Center…it got pretty noisy. Then add on that all the kids who came to gawk at the muzungus decided that going home would take too long and they would get wet, so we also had about 40 kids laughing and yelling and playing in the Center. NOT an easy situation, but I made it work (with much yelling of “mugende!”, meaning “go away!” at the kids).
On the last day of the last trip, being yesterday, the team and I, along with a few Baha’is from Kigali who showed up in the morning, went to visit the headmaster of the school where Emmanuel teaches. The headmaster first asked why we weren’t staying for longer, to which we answered “sorry, we’d love to, but we don’t have the time”, both statements being true. Today Irene and I go to Muhazi with Papa Jean and some of his family for a weekend vacation (Chris’ idea), then on Tuesday Irene leaves, and then I have a million things to do before I leave. 10 days, folks!
That’s all I’ve got!
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Mark Baker
non-member comment
Rain, rain, go away
Dear Kevin, You are right, be careful what you pray for! At least it must have cooled you off a bit. I can't believe that you had 50 show up for Ruhi book 1! That's amazing. Makes you realize what you could do with more time. Oh, well. You can always go back one day. Be happy with what you did accomplish. See you soon. Love, Daddy