Day Fifty Two

Expect to encounter a lot of Baha'i jargon in this particular post!

We have a Continental Counsellor staying with us now. Exciting, huh? I've never even seen the Counsellors for North America, and I've been here only two months and there's one staying with us. Then again, if I worked at the BNC in Chicago I'd probably have met one by now. She happened to be on the same flight with Dr. Sabet when they were returning from Sudan. He was there for work, and she was there attending the Sudanese National Convention. So, I guess she's here until our Convention, which will be nice.

Since the last NTC meeting, I've had a ton of things piled on me. The NSA Secretary met with us and told us that 40 delegates from the western part of the country will be coming a day early for the Convention because of the train schedule. So not only have I been trying to deal with accomodations and food arrangements for them, but I'm also supposed to formulate a program to keep these delegates busy on Thursday and Friday until the Convention starts. In the U.S. I think this would be a crisis of an enormous magnitude. I still haven't adjusted to the different culture here, so of course I was freaking out. Dr. Sabet told me it wasn't as big of a thing as I thought it was; a very simple program would suffice. After consulting with the Counsellor, she made a phone call and asked one of her auxiliaries to come early to oversee the program. So now I just have to put together some documents, and the ABM will take over. Phew.

In addition to various minor details concerning the Convention, I'm also supposed to be working on a draft report/presentation for the NTC to present at the upcoming Inter-Institutional Conference at the end of May between the Counsellors, ABMs, the NSA, cluster coordinating committees, national agencies, the RBCs, etc. The report is supposed to lay out a plan of action for the next year for utilization of human resources, pioneering, and cluster development for the whole country! I've never worked on anything on a national scale at any point in my life, so I think this will be a challenging assignment. The NTC will be reviewing the presentation a week before the conference so at least I'm not doing the whole thing and then just throwing it out there.

Following the National Convention, I'm supposed to go back to Zanzibar with one of the members of the National Spiritual Assembly, who also happens to be a homefront pioneer! I think I'll have to stop back in Dar for a day or two, since going directly from Convention to Zanzibar might be a bit much, and I'll need to prepare some materials to take with me. Following the Inter-Institutional Conference, I'll have to start going around visiting some of the other homefront pioneers. They're doing some amazing work out in the field and in my story for the upcoming May issue of The Central Arkansas Baha'i there should be something about the inspiring efforts of one of these friends.

While I'm at Convention, I'm supposed to speak to the delegates from Arusha about the possibility of going there to tutor some study circles. The work of the Faith there has really been stunted because they don't have any tutors! People have only finished Books 1-3, so I'm probably going to go for a month or so to do crash courses of Books 4, 6, and 7 for those few friends who speak enough English to be able to do it with me.

There is so much work that can be done here, especially organizational and administrative. For instance, the poor Counsellor didn't even have copies of the National Convention program and the Inter-Institutional Conference program. She's supposed to be speaking at both events, and she didn't even know what about! She even told me to be sure to check with the friends who are supposed to speak at the Convention - this coming weekend - to make sure someone had notified them they were supposed to come speak. Things like that leave me totally exasperrated because they're such easy things to fix, but it doesn't seem to really faze anyone else.

When I got the program, I saw that the NTC is supposed to deliver a report to the delegates and arrange for evening entertainment on Saturday night, two things that no one ever mentioned to me. Dr. Sabet said the report is on the agenda every year, but the NTC just never does it. That's just sad. So, I guess for evening entertainment, the friends can watch my head explode. =P