The Story of $5,000 and the Girl Who Wanted to Pioneer

What to Write About?

What to write about?

Last night as I was dozing off in front of my computer (as I often do) I posted on my facebook status the question, “what should I write about next?”. I got all sorts of wonderful responses and messages with suggestions. One of them that jumped out at me was saying that I should write about something that I have learned about recently and another one was that I should share more stories about my life in East Africa.

Confirmation!

I think that I will do a little of both. One of the recent things that I have been learning about is the meaning of the word CONFIRMATION and the application of this word. Our Junior youth group that I run in Oxford has been studying a book called “Breezes of Confirmation” The story in the book follows the lives of four young people in their journey to develop skills and talents that will allow them to serve their community. The characters are confronted with various challenges, similar to each of us in our own lives, and they must make choices on how to respond to situations that are not ideal. One of the things that we learn from the book is that effort is needed if we are going to develop ourselves and that God assists us when we make effort especially when we are making effort to serve others and bring justice to the world. The quotation that we learned this week in our junior youth group was, “Work done in the spirit of service is the highest form of worship” ~Abdu’l-Baha.  Sometimes, we feel sad because we are making effort and the result is not what we were looking for and we can feel like we have been left alone.

Football Confirmation?

Tired and Training

I’m struggling to find a way to relate this concept to football, but I do love a good challenge. This is like players return to practice at the start of a new season and they must build up their physical endurance to a level where they are able to utilize the skills and footwork that they have taken years in investing. At the beginning of every season our coach would kill us with fitness… over and over again. Every Monday we would have to run 10 laps around the football pitch (no cutting corners), then we would rest for a minute and then do 9 laps, and then 8 laps and you get the picture. We would have to do extensive abdominal workout and resistance training. It was so hard and painful but we made the effort and the confirmation came when we would enter a pitch and play a game were we could run for 90 min and not break down, where we could tackle and not foul the other player. Does that make sense?

Last night Grace, Joy and I were meeting to discuss the upcoming move to Rose Hill and we started talking about the meaning of confirmation and we realized that sometimes everything falls apart right before the confirmation comes. That we feel alone and abandoned, but in hindsight we understand that it lead us in the place that we were meant to be and this reminded me of a story… actually of many but I will share one with you;

The Story of $5,000 and the Girl Who Wanted to Pioneer

Africa

When I was 18 years old I moved to East Africa (Tanzania) to do a year of service, where I was helping to develop the activities of the Baha’i community in a small village in Tanzania. I had a very difficult year there full of many spiritual battles and physical challenges. In fact I had been counting down the days till i could leave from the moment that I arrived. At the end of my year a letter came out from the African Pioneering Committee (a group of people who helped to coordinate the Baha’is who were helping with the development of Baha’i communities across Africa) inviting students to consider going to university in Africa to help share with the university population the Teachings of Baha’u'llah. The moment that I read that letter I knew in my heart that I should stay and I felt sick to my stomach, I had wanted nothing more than to return to my previous life in America. The stories of my first year as a student in Tanzania are the subject of another series of posts, but it was wild. I was the only white person in that university and was definitely off-beat and out-of-tune next to my classmates. To make a long story very short I kept getting ill and needed more extensive medical treatment than I was able to get in Tanzania. The last close call I had resulted in me getting sent to Kenya for an emergency surgery to remove part of my intestines that the Amoebic Dysentery had feasted on (I’ll spare you the details). I realized that if I were to stay in Africa I needed to be in a place where I could have access to medical treatment so I moved to Kenya. The university that I wanted to attend in Kenya was much more expensive and I was not eligible for financial aid, loans or grants. I did not know what I was going to do.

To Serve or the Work? That is the question

Money

I went home for the summer to see my family and while I was there my plan was to work all summer and raise at least $3,000 of the $5,000 I required to go back to Kenya and resume my post as a pioneer. However when i reached home one of my Baha’i aunties told me… Clare this is not the summer for working, this is the summer for service! My mother told me, this is not the summer for service, this is the summer for working! I consulted a few more trusted friends and I realized that I should spend my summer serving and training in a sequence of courses developed by the Baha’i Community that would allow me to develop skills (such as to run a devotional meeting, have a children’s class for the spiritual education of children, start a junior youth empowerment project and to be able to help guide others through these courses as well). I spent the last few pennies I had getting the training and then I went on to give a presentation at a Baha’i summer school on youth pioneering…

While I was there it suddenly hit me that I was leaving to Africa in 10 days, i had a one way ticket to Nairobi and no money left. I did even have money to pay for a room to sleep in. I broke down crying in one of the sessions and told the friends, “there are times when your heart is in the right position and you think you are doing the right thing… but what was I thinking? I need money to go… and I spent all summer not worrying about it and now I don’t have a way to go.” The other friends consoled me telling me that things would work out as they should.

The Gift of a Youth

A Letter (not the real one)

That night I went home to pack up my things and prepare for the flight home the next day, as I was packing my bags I found a card in on of my books. A girl, my age, had handed me this card a week before and asked me not to open it until she was gone and I had put it away and forgotten it was there. As I opened the card a check for $5,000 fell onto my lap. In the card she wrote to me that her heart longed to go pioneer but because of her specific form of studies she was unable to do so. She had earned and saved the money and was giving it to me so that she might feel that her heart was pioneering too. This was someone who is 19 years old! That money sustained me for a whole year and without it I would not have been able to be there. It was also vital that I spent my summer serving because at that time there were only 2 people who had been through the entire sequence of courses and could help assist others through it (quickly many more were able to do so) but it was a blessing upon a blessing.

I have never told anyone who the girl is, and I think she would like it that way, but I will tell you that she has now been pioneering for many years. The moral of the story to me is that we have to put effort into a situation and then trust that things will work out.

YOUR IDEAS?

Sooo, any ideas for what I should write about next? I love hearing your ideas!!