I touch down in Bole International Airport, Addis Ababa at 11pm. No accommodation booked never mind a plan for traversing from Ethiopia to Uganda. I don’t know how friendly the people will be, their languages, the road conditions, the vehicles I’ll be able to use, what the border crossings will be like, or even how long I’ll survive before getting gastro enteritis. In short, I arrive in a new country with a four week, 2000 kilometre journey ahead of me and no idea about what I’m getting myself in to.
I spend a few days in Addis Ababa and then begin to make my way south through and eventually across Africa’s Rift Valley. For the 1500 kilometres from Addis Ababa to Nairobi I don’t meet a single Bahá’í. A lot of people seem to know of the Bahá’ís, some claim to have Bahá’í friends, but they’re never able to give me any information about local Bahá’í centres (which exist in practically every town), or even contact details for local Bahá’ís. As a result, my travels speed up and when I get to Ethiopia’s border with Kenya at Moyale I find myself a week ahead of schedule. I contact an English friend who’s in the area and she invites me to visit some Maasai Bahá'ís in Northern Tanzania with her and her friend. It takes me five days and countless bribes to get from Moyale to Namanga at Kenya’s southern border with Tanzania. One of these five days is spent in Nairobi at the National Bahá'í centre and at this point my journey changes significantly.
Until now, I have used my Lonely Planet guides and knowledge from whatever locals I can befriend along the way as my map and compass. Now that I’m with a Brit who’s been here before, I’m comfortable to leave the decision making to her. After meeting my old and new friends in Nairobi, the three of us continue to Arusha in Northern Tanzania via Namanga. Arusha is about 400 kilometres out of my way but the introduction to true African Bahá'í culture that I receive in Tanzania is well worth the extra miles. We spend the next few days in the rural areas surrounding Monduli, a small town about 30 kilometres away from the bustling metropolis of Arusha. In the vast countryside, I learn to herd cattle, resurrect a phone out of a water tank, drive a taxi, and dance like a muzungu. But when I leave, I reflect on my experiences and I learn something much more important. Something that changes my attitude towards advancing the process of entry by troops.
I am in an area of about two or three hundred people named Lendikinya. They call it a village here, but the small groups of huts (called bomas) are spread out over four or five square miles, making it more of a townland in my opinion. There is no electricity or running water. When people want to charge their phones or buy food, they walk for three hours to Monduli, the nearest town. We are in the foothills of Mt Meru, not a million miles away from Kilimanjaro in Northern Tanzania. There’s a vast expanse of flat land to the south with rolling hills to the north. But in the centre of this townland, on the top of a hill, about a ten minute walk from the watering hole, and surrounded by circular bomas, each of which is comprised of five to ten small circular mud huts with thatched roofs, is a building with four walls and a tin roof. It is the local Bahá'í centre. While we are visiting, the Continental Counsellor visits, and the meeting at the Bahá'í centre is buzzing. There are about 120 people packed in perched on stones along the walls and sprawled on the floor. Men and women. Young and old. The place is packed. I think about the surrounding area and thehandful of homes that I’ve seen and wonder where they’ve all come from. I enquire and find out that about 80% of the population of this townland is Bahá'í. Four years ago, there were no Bahá'ís here at all. How is this possible? What is happening here that is so vastly different to Northern Ireland?
I leave Tanzania after four blissful days with the Maasai warriors wondering what it is that I’ve missed. How is it possible for the Bahá'í Faith to grow so quickly in such a small and desolate place in such a short time and with such few resources? I continue to think about this while I return to the National Bahá'í Centre in Nairobi to collect some things that I left there when I went to Tanzania. I happen to talk to a Bahá'í in Nairobi about my plans to visit a Bahá'í inspired NGO that uses FUNDAEC’s ‘Preparation for Social Action’ programme in Jinja, Uganda. He suggests that I first visit Mwelekeo, an NGO based in Tiriki West cluster in the west of Kenya that uses the same programme. I know the name Tiriki West but I don’t know where from until my new friend tells me that it’s one of the most advanced clusters in the world and is the Institute learning site for Eastern Africa and the adjacent islands of the Indian Ocean. It doesn’t take much more to persuade me to go, and the following evening I find myself in the presence of John, Mwelekeo’s field coordinator.
After just three days spent learning about Mwelekeo specifically and the Tiriki West cluster in general, pieces of my jigsaw start coming together. While riding around from place to place on the back of John’s badly built Chinese motorcycle, we stop every few minutes to speak to someone. We also slow down between stops to wave at or say a quick hello to people along the way. After almost every conversation and wave, John shouts over the noise of the engine “he’s a Bahá'í”. It seems like half of the people we pass are Bahá'ís, and if they’re not, then they’re somehow involved with Mwelekeo – either as a tutor or a family member of a student. I have previously visited Bahá'ís and Bahá'í communities in countries throughout four continents. Some communities had thousands of Bahá'ís, and some had only a single believer. Some were in very highly developed clusters and some were in areas where clustering has, in 2011, still not yet happened. But none of those experiences have prepared me adequately for what the Bahá'í Faith is in Eastern Africa. In Tiriki West cluster, I begin to understand what happened with the Maasai in Northern Tanzania; but still, it takes me another month to begin to articulate this burgeoning realisation and it is while praying in the Mother Temple of Africa that I have what my good friend TBird would call an epiphany concerning the matter of the advancement of The Faith in these areas compared to its advancement in Northern Ireland.
I’m now sitting in the office of the Uganda Bahá'í Institute for Development (‘Uganda Training Institute’ isn’t good enough for them here) at the National Bahá'í Centre in Kampala. The temple is about 500 metres away and we’re surrounded by lush greenery that hosts birds who manage to sing above the noise of the petrol generator that we use when there’s no power. I’m supposed to be typing a translation of the Ruhi Institute’s new version of Teaching Children’s Classes, Grade 1 into Luganda, the most common language in Uganda. Instead, I’m thinking about what I’ve learnt from the Bahá'í communities in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda.
One of my conversations with John in Tiriki West was about how they initiate their activities. He didn’t seem to understand my question though: “so how is it that you’ve brought so many people into The Faith here?” [blank expression] “like how do you invite them all to do Book 1? Or do you invite them to a devotional first?” “Well,” John beginsslowly, clearly startled by the question, “we just try things”. “What do you mean you just try things?” “We just try different things”. “In my country we’re scared of trying new things” I begin, but before I can continue, John asks “what do you mean scared?” “Like fear of the unknown I suppose… John is clearly quite taken aback by this conversation. I’ve been talking to him about a lot of things over the past few days but he’s never reacted in this way to any of my questions. I then realise that when the Universal House of Justice told us that “fear of failure finds no place”, the Bahá'ís of Gisumu in Tiriki West cluster probably didn’t understand… or maybe they did and it’s because of their obedience back then that John doesn’t understand it now.
John runs a successful NGO, lives in a newly built house with a wife and newly born son, owns a motorbike, two cows and four goats. But all of this could disappear in a matter of months if things continued to become more difficult. Surrounding his house is a wide variety of crops in about half an acre of land. He has bananas, plantains, maize, potatoes, and a few other plants that I don’t recognise. I also notice a compost heap. He tells me about how all of this came about. He dug the clay for the bricks for his house by hand; then he and his father moulded and fired the bricks. They built the house together over a period of months but they were only able to plaster two rooms before John ran out of money. Meanwhile, however, he had started planting the way the PSA text Planting Crops advises, and created a compost heap at the same time. His land looked very different to his neighbours’ but he didn’t care. He was doing it this way because FUNDAEC advised him to and if it didn’t work then he’d only have lost a season of crops.
This, I now realise, seems to be the fundamental difference between the way the Bahá'ís think in these more advanced clusters, and the way we think in Northern Ireland. John has very little. He doesn’t have enough money to finish plastering his house or even to fill his motorbike’s ten litre fuel tank. But he’s prepared to risk a season’s crops just because a FUNDAEC text says that this way of planting is better than his way. Materially, he has so much more to lose than we do in Northern Ireland, yet he takes risks that few of us would take. Risks related to both the material and the spiritual aspects of his life. He’s prepared to completely change the way he shares The Faith with his friends just because of what he learns in Ruhi’s Arising to Serve and Teaching the Cause. John is just a random 24 year old man who wants to grow closer to God in the way that we do in Northern Ireland. He’s in no way better or worse than any of the rest of us. But his attitude is why he and his family are progressing – both materially and spiritually. And the collective culture created by this individual attitude is also why his cluster is the one that we always read about in 'Reflections on Growth'.
What is it about us in Northern Ireland that’s prevented our Bahá’í community from advancing the way other communities have all over the world? Is it linked to Northern Ireland’s culture perhaps? Or our Bahá'í culture here? Maybe there are no receptive populations in Northern Ireland? But why do they have advanced clusters down South and in England? Is there really a big difference between the English or the Southern community and ours? In East Africa, it’s not about following rules and formulas; instead the people have become adept at reading their social reality and using The Faith to meet their needs. Is there a way that we could do the same? Maybe instead of simply following rules and doing what we’re told all the time we need some sort of new energy in the mix? If we keep following without engaging our minds and hearts, will we be able to develop a vibrant Northern Irish Bahá'í community?
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