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.