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.