Right, so the Olympics have been over for days, but just a heads up that Nelson Évora, a triple jumper from Portugal, won gold. His coach Joao Ganco was the one that introduced Évora to the Baha’i Faith.
Here he is jumping at the world championships in Osaka last year. If anyone knows of video of his winning jump that may have slipped through the NBC net, do let us know.

This whole blogging-from-the-road thing is much rougher than I thought it would be. Especially for someone who gets car-sick just looking at the map, so blogging from the passenger seat is out of the question (that’s my mom doing some of the driving).

Anyway, after leaving Edmonton, we sped through Saskatoon and Winnipeg fairly quickly and did a marathon 26 hour drive from Winnipeg into Toronto where we spent a day documenting a community outreach project that’s being carried out almost entirely by youth aged 11-15.

The coordinators of the project are older, but the youth are the ones going out, talking to people, teaching the classes for kids, talking to people about the Baha’i Faith. It’s all pretty amazing.

After Toronto, we continued our eastward journey heading into Quebec for a Baha’i family camp. The focus of these camps is really about training and education, so they’re normally referred to as ’summer schools’ (or ‘winter schools’ depending on the season).

I was told that the topics they were studying here in Quebec are the same that are being studied at other camps that are going on all summer across the country. So if anyone out there was at the summer school in Silvan Lake, Alberta; or Shawnigan Lake, BC; or Winnipeg, Manitoba; you were probably studying the same thing that they were studying in Quebec. But you were probably doing it in english.

Sadly, despite 11 years of studying it in school, my french skills are rather meagre, so I can’t really tell you much more than that, but there was a lot of french study, a lot of french singing and a lot of french laugher.
We’re now in Halifax and, having gone almost as far East as we can, we’ll be turning around tomorrow and heading back to Montreal, where they’re doing more community outreach. I just hope someone there can help with translation…

While we’re on the topic of Rainn Wilson, everyone’s favorite crazy sea mammal has just launched Soul Pancake, a site for those who are “sick of spirituality having to be hippy-dippy, airy-fairy and uber-precious,” that seeks to “de-lamify talking about God & Religion.” And all that with a side of Pancakes? Rainn Wilson is a man after my own heart.

I’m not doing a great job of keeping up, seeing as how I left Edmonton two days ago and am just getting around to posting about it now, but they did keep me pretty busy while I was there. Here’s a quick rundown of a typical day:
The community outreach team meets in the morning for prayers and reflection on the previous day’s activities. The size of the team varies in size from 20 to almost 40 from day to day, with some members there all day every day and others coming in on their days off or when they finished work in the afternoon. There are also participants that had come in from other cities just to assist with Edmonton’s community outreach, some staying for the full 9 days, others just for one or two. The team is conducting outreach in 4 different neighbourhoods, so after a group reflection, everyone splits up into their neighbourhood teams and continues to plan their activities and study materials that would assist them with their outreach (how to conduct effective classes for children for example, or ways to initiate conversations about religion in a society that would really rather talk about anything but.)

After a quick break for lunch, the separate neighbourhood teams head out to their respective communities where they break into pairs and set off into the neighbourhoods. Some pairs would visit parks or community centres, some pairs would visit with parents to further explain the classes for children and youth, some pairs would visit with people to do more detailed presentations about the Baha’i Faith, and some pairs would just go door to door in the community to tell people about the programs that the Baha’is were organizing in the community as well as just raise awareness about the Baha’i Faith.

Another quick break for dinner and then the teams in each neighbourhood prepare for their activities, which can include classes for children, classes for youth, study groups or devotional meetings. In all of the places that I’ve seen in the past few weeks, the children’s class has been the most popular. Usually held in a park somewhere in the neighbourhood, the classes are composed of children of families that the teams have met during the afternoon but often attract children who just happen to be in the park while the classes are going on as well. Sometimes the kids are the ones dragging their parents over to check out the class and sometimes it’s the parents that are dragging the kids, but either way the kids usually don’t want to leave at the end.

After the classes are over, all of the teams meet back at the community outreach HQ (in Edmonton it was the home of one of the Baha’is) to share experiences from the day, reflect on what they had learned and consult on how to use that learning to improve their outreach the next day. These projects usually continue for 9-14 days, 12 hours a day. It’s a very intense experience and, between the regular prayer and spirit of service, one that creates tight bonds among the participants.

Rainn Wilson, big time actor, kidnapper and tv star was on NPR recently to plug his new movie and, while he was at it, took an oportunity to talk about growing up in a Baha’i family (at 28:06). Also, while I was off galavanting about the place, he did an interview with the Baha’i World News Service, so you might as well check that out while you’re at it.

Still here in Edmonton, still documenting community outreach. To get an idea of the kinds of activities that are coming out of these outreach projects, have a listen to this report from WMNF radio in Tampa, FL. (direct link to the mp3 here.)

I arrived in Edmonton yesterday and will be here through the weekend covering another community outreach project, but first I wanted to put up an update about the on-going persecution of the Baha’i community in Iran.
Back on May 14th, 6 Baha’i leaders were arrested in Tehran and taken to Evin prison where they have been held since then. From a BBC story on May 19:

A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the arrests were a judicial matter and he did not give any further details.
The Bahai International Community says a senior member was arrested in March and six more last week; together they make up the entire leadership in Iran.
It says it has about 300,000 members in Iran, where the faith originated.
Relatives said the six senior members were taken to Evin Prison in Tehran on 14 May, after Intelligence Ministry officers raided their homes in the middle of the night.

More stories here and here.

On August first, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the persecution of the Baha’is in Iran:

“This is government-sponsored persecution,” said Rep. Mark Kirk (IL-10), who introduced the resolution. “And we in the Congress should not be silent as Iran sets up the mechanism to ethnically cleanse its Baha’i minority, totaling over 250,000 human beings.”

“It sends a strong signal that Congress will continue to watch closely the treatment of the Baha’i people in Iran,” said Rep Howard L. Berman (CA-28), who is the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and co-sponsored the resolution.

And then on August third, a report in an Iranian newspaper claimed that the detained Baha’is had confessed to “setting up an illegal organisation with connections to a number of countries including Israel and they have received orders from them to undertake measures against the Islamic system.”
The international Baha’i community was quick to deny the report, saying:

“We deny in the strongest possible terms the suggestion that Baha’is in Iran have engaged in any subversive activity,” said Bani Dugal, principal representative of the Baha’i International Community to the United Nations. “The Baha’i community is not involved in political affairs. Their only ‘crime’ is the practice of their religion.”

“The seriousness of the allegations makes us fear for the lives of these seven individuals,” she said.

She was responding to Iranian newspaper reports of statements by Hasan Haddad, deputy prosecutor general for security at the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran.

Numerous groups have spoken out against this latest wave of persecution against the Baha’is in Iran, including the Nobel Women’s Initiative, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and the Canadian Foreign Affairs Ministry.

Left Ottawa, flew across the country, spent the weekend in Vancouver with a group doing community outreach in 9 different neighbourhoods across the city. It’s pretty much the same thing here as it was in Ottawa (though on a larger scale), classes for children, devotional meetings, and generally talking to people about religion, about spirituality and about the Baha’i Faith. Here people are prepping for a children’s class, making arrangements to go and pick up the kids in a neighbourhood called Skeena.


Again, the classes here are virtually identical to the classes in Ottawa (and, in fact, classes that are going on all around the world) consisting of prayers, songs, stories, crafts and games designed to foster virtues and unity in the community.

I first heard about musical firesides when I was in Kuala Lumpur last year, and though I didn’t have a chance to go to one until I got to Ottawa, I had heard about them being used in India, the US, the UK, France and all across Canada. And I’m sure they’re being used in another dozen countries as well, but it’s just so hard to keep up these days.


Anyway, a ‘musical fireside’ is simply a presentation about the basics of the Baha’i Faith that incorporates video, photos, songs and prayers. It’s an opportunity for Baha’is to invite their friends and neighbours to find out what Baha’is actually believe. These days, religion having the reputation that it does, people are often hesitant to talk about spirituality and belief (whether it’s your own or someone else’s) even when others are genuinely interested in it. So this way, people can get together, eat some food, watch a presentation, sing some songs and have a discussion about religion and spirituality. The singing, as you can see, is key.


After the songs, more food and some discussion. Time to drink tea and ask questions and get to know your friends and neighbours. Because, after all, isn’t understanding a fairly key step on the way to unity?