1st stop: Ottawa
Monday, July 28th, 2008
I’ve been in Ottawa for a couple of days now hanging out with a group of about 20 Baha’is who are doing community outreach in a neighbourhood called Bayshore. They’ve been organizing devotional meetings, study groups and classes for children. Here a few of the participants take an opportunity to reflect on the people that they’d talked to that day as well as plan for the evening children’s class.
The children’s classes teach morals and virtues (like love, patience, honesty, unity and justice) using songs, stories, games and crafts. They’ve had 15-20 kids there the past couple of days, and while the kids laughed and played, the parents would come and chat with the organizers. Here michel goes through a book with a young boy. Because this is Ottawa, there is a real mix of english and french among both the organizers and the participants. This evening’s class was conducted in english and this young boy spoke only french, so Michel was taking a moment to translate this book for him.
At the devotional meetings, members of the community are invited to come together and say prayers and read holy writings from any of the world’s religions. This one was pretty chill, and after praying and meditating together, people hung out and had tea and chatted for a while. Nothing like praying together to build unity in a community, no matter what religious background we all come from.
Life never really works out the way that I plan (which is why I’ve largely given up on planning altogether). The last time I dropped a post on this blog, I was about to hit the road for what turned into an 14 month global tour of fun and adventure that included 18 countries, 78 separate flights, 79 different beds and approximately 125,000 photos. I know I had promised that I would blog as much as I could, but, sadly reality is rarely as easy I imagine and the prospect of getting a post up from Carracollo, Bolivia; Preah Vihear, Cambodia or Mulanje, Malawi was a little more than I could handle while trying to keep up with booking tickets, finding translators, trying to keep airport security goons from confiscating my cameras and securing a steady flow of delicious cups of tea (it’s all about the priorities).
For those of us who came into the Baha'i Faith through the ever popular 
