In For a New Experience

In Chicago one of the many Bahá’í hats I wore was “Pioneer Resource Person,” a representative of the Office of International Pioneering at the community level, making presentations at Feasts and encouraging those who could and especially those who believed they couldn’t to forsake their homes and go to distant lands to serve the Faith. But not for a moment during this time did I think I would actually go myself. After all, I was serving here. I was needed here. But, like a traffic accident which happens suddenly without warning, events in a plodding existence took a precipitous turn, and my thoughts turned to pioneering, and also to learning a new language. Where would I go? Hungary is in dire need of pioneers who can speak the native language; this was brought home to me by the royal treatment I received on a travel-teaching trip in 2003. What language would I learn? Why, Arabic, of course. And then the call came to go to Honduras, and I answered without question, for I perceived it as the call of the very voice I could not ignore. At a gathering on the night before I left, a friend quipped that I must have been mumbling my prayers, and God heard “Honduras” instead of “Hungary.” And the new language must needs be Spanish.

But there was no turning back. Who should I meet in the waiting lounge at Pearson Airport in Toronto reading a Bahá’í prayer book but a Canadian on her way to Honduras to serve as an Auxiliary Board Member? She had been there many years and gave me much advice on the flight. Yet as someone who had lived for half a century in sophisticated metropolises in the privileged part of the world, on the mango- and poverty-lined road up the mountains which Christopher Columbus had called “the depths,” I was in for more jolts and jabs than Mike Tyson could have inflicted upon me.

On the very day I arrived, I overheard a telephone conversation which included the following sentence: “Bring the machetes to the devotional gathering.” I knew I was in for a new experience. The machetes were used to cut the grass, prune the trees, and clear the weeds at the local Bahá’í Centre that had fallen into neglect over the summer, and fixed in my memory is the image of elderly Doña Julia in her formal black dress and high-heeled shoes stooped down and wielding the machete like the blades of a helicopter over the screaming weeds. Lesson #1 in Honduran culture.

I’ve heard of mobile book units before, but where else is the Bahá’í library located under the seat of a motorcycle, wending its way up gnarled rocky mountain roads? That is where Joycelyn Jolly, a striking black American woman who was an accomplished cellist and Suzuki teacher who adopted an orphaned girl in Brazil kept the books as she provided this service amidst her struggle to be a single mother and obedient servant of the Five Year Plan. Her struggles were causing her to look elsewhere, and she suddenly got a marriage proposal from a musical colleague stretching back over a quarter of century who began scouring the planet for her after he had lost his wife. Since she left for Baltimore, I have been performing this function, keeping all the books under lock and key, and bringing them out for display carefully and gently at every Feast.

There are many other singular events, but probably the most astonishing was watching a one-legged man during prayers at a Feast methodically chase down a spider on a wall, leaning to the point where surely he was going to topple over first this way and then that, reaching and contorting, until finally at an angle Olympic gymnasts the world over must envy, whacked the spider -- with a Bahá’í prayer book! -- all while the prayer continued unabated and unconcerned. I admit at the time what I felt was shame, but now I regard as one of the more bizarre scenes in a community that spearheads an “A Cluster” (designated as being at an advanced stage of organization) but is still in the infant stages of love and reverence for Bahá’u’lláh.

My experiences in Honduras are posted as a series of updates on a separate blog, siguahon.blogspot.com.