Cluster Reflection Gathering

Today was a cluster reflection gathering. Once every three months, Baha'is from around the area (a cluster is bigger than a community but smaller than a region - often divided along county lines) meet to discuss the development of the core activities in the cluster and plan for the coming three months. The focus of today's reflection gathering was junior youth groups, since in the past three months, five of the local Navajo youth went to the Book 5 training in Phoenix (Book 5 is the book about junior youth groups).

Junior youth groups aren't supposed to be school or babysitting. They're support groups, where middle-school-aged youth get together to discuss their lives and take charge of their own education and spiritual development, with a youth (typically age 15 to 30) "animator" there who provides structure to the group and is a friend and mentor to the younger youth. So, at the reflection gathering today, the youth took leadership in the discussion, planning how to start new junior youth groups and revitalize current ones.

And then, because we're all children inside, we wrote down our individual plans for what we could contribute to the junior youth groups on colored paper and stuck them on a pretty tree! This picture shows everyone who came to the gathering. The man behind the tree with the white eyepatch is Jerry Bathke, and his wife Alice is the second woman to the left of him, wearing a red necklace. They're the NABI co-coordinators. The woman on the far left is Janet, the NABI administrative assistant. The blonde in the front is me.



Today was a good day because I was reunited with many of my friends from the Book 5 training in Phoenix, which was in the beginning of July. I got to go to this training since I was already in Phoenix for the wedding of my friends from MIT, Kelley and Hristo, which was beautiful but I don't have photos. One of my buddies is Sherwin, who's 15 and will one day be a famous fashion designer. In the photo below he's the (other) one in the yellow hoodie. This is the door of the big hogan (pronounced "hoe-GONE" as in "my hoe is gone!"). The nine-pointed star on the door is the symbol of the Baha'i Faith. Below the star is Ghazal, my roommate from yesterday's blog entry.



Here's some more of my buddies. From left to right: me, Alyssa, Sherwin, and Sherwin's cousin Aisha, whom I just met today.



The landscape is much more green than I expected. One reason is because we're at a high elevation - mountain desert is different from valley desert. Another reason is because I arrived about three weeks after monsoon season. Even though it was a dry year, the rain made the world turn green. There's yellow green and spring green and gray green and dark green. It's very pretty (see below). We also saw a coyote and tons of prairie dogs (they were popping up on the road like that arcade game where you have to hit them with hammers), but I didn't get pictures.

My year of service

I arrived yesterday at the Native American Baha'i Institute (NABI; www.nativeamericanbi.org) to begin a year of service. Baha'i youth are encouraged, though not required, to do a year of service at some point. I was lucky that the Caltech Department of Astrophysics let me defer a year before starting grad school, so that I have a chance to do this year of service.

NABI is in Houck, AZ, on the Navajo reservation. It was started in 1980 after the Navajo Baha'is decided that they would like to have a Baha'i institute on the reservation, and it receives support from the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is. One of the purposes of NABI is to offer the local Baha'is training about the "core activities," which are five different activities that are very important to Baha'i community life:
-study circles
-devotionals
-children's classes
-junior youth groups, and
-home visits (community members visit each other for spiritual discussion and possibly cookies).
I'm still not quite sure what I'll be doing here at NABI, but it sounds like I'll get to be involved in the core activities, which will be very fun. Ghazal, one of my roommates, told me that I better like children. I do.

Yesterday, I flew from Baltimore to Albuquerque. My friend Juliet Wing, who was a Baha'i in Boston at the same time as me but now lives in Albuquerque, took me home and fed me a yummy sandwich with wasabi mayonnaise, and we read some of Ruhi Book 5, which is a book used for study circles that provides training about how to do junior youth groups. Then she took me to the train station and I rode the Amtrak train to Gallup.

I ended up in a viewing car on the Amtrak train, with immense windows that showed the blue sky and spacious seats facing outwards towards these windows. The landscape here is incredible - the sky so blue, the clay so red, the little bush things green, the afternoon light falling on the hills and mountains turning everything gold. In Gallup, Janet, who is the administrative assistant at NABI, picked me up and treated me to a yummy dinner, and then we drove the 45 minutes back to NABI. Once we got off the highway, we were on bumpy dirt roads for about 10 minutes. I rolled down the window and stuck my head out and looked up at the sky, which is so full of stars.

I am sharing a very comfortable trailer with two other girls, Camille and Ghazal. Both of them have been here since the beginning of July. Ghazal showed me pictures of everything they've done since then and I wish I could have been there: slaughtering a sheep (my elegant friend Dorna holding up its bloody, severed head), sweat lodge, and children's classes full of adorable children. Since this is Ghazal's last Saturday, we went to the flea market in Gallup for her to buy souvenirs. You bargain there, just like in China! I didn't buy anything, since I have a year to decide what I want. I'm trying to add a picture (notice the sign that says "Free Prayer" in the background) but not sure it will work.



Here is a picture of me, Camille, and Ghazal in front of Walmart, where we get everything we need. Today the Walmart was so busy that there was a traffic jam in the parking lot.



Here is my bedroom in the trailer. We each have our own room, so the other bed is just a spare. I stayed up late last night to unpack because it just feels so good to unpack. It's one of my favorite activities.



Here is a picture of the landscape (through the car window). In a photograph, it's hard to capture the feeling of depth, and vastness, that you get from actually being there. We saw a long, long train, but there are wide open spaces here and we could see the whole train at once.



There's a lovely dreamcatcher hanging in the car. The little symbol in the middle is Arabic calligraphy for Allah'u'Abha, God is All-Glorious, which Baha'is say to each other in greeting.