Dispatch from an international pioneer gathering in Romania

Martharoot Malungu, who is relocating from Ontario to Lithuania to meet Canada’s international pioneering goals, shares stories from a training she attended in November.

At the pioneer training in Bucharest, Romania, we studied guidance and heard about the efforts of pioneers who have already settled throughout the Baltics and Eastern Europe, as well as about the community-building process in Romania itself. Pioneering has been an effective means of disseminating learning from countries with a strong educational process to those which have yet to learn about engaging large numbers.

We were asked to share the following quotation with our home clusters to illustrate how our work is connected internationally: “We must know this one very essential point, the beloved Guardian says every pioneer who is going out of his community for pioneering is not only inspiring and useful to his future post but is also going to be a source of help and inspiration in his own community. The bounty of God will come to every community that is sending a pioneer.”[1]

The friends shared stories about how communities worldwide, like ours, are trying to understand what it means to offer the training institute in ways that can embrace larger segments of a population. One of the members of the Continental Board of Counsellors urged us to allow ourselves to be uncomfortable so that we are not just doing what we know works well but are sincerely trying to explore the implications of this question.

Bucharest, Romania is the most advanced cluster in Eastern Europe. It passed the third milestone, and the friends have seen how integral a thriving junior youth spiritual empowerment program has been to this progress. In particular, the friends have been working in centres of intense activity, and exploring how “a significant percentage of the entire population” can be involved in community-building activities, particularly children and junior youth.[2] The House of Justice explains, “When the reach of activity is extensive, the societal impact of the Faith becomes more evident.”[3]

This past summer, the friends serving in one of the centres of intense activity planned a camp for the junior youth, as they have for years. The animators and families consulted about how the camp could become a space open to all the junior youth in their neighbourhood. This required the animators to expand their vision. They went from “I love the junior youth in my group” to “I love all the junior youth in our neighbourhood,” and began to act accordingly.

They realized that holding the camp at their neighbourhood centre would not allow for the participation of many junior youth due to limited space. The camp needed to be more visible and inviting. Across the street from the centre was a large grassy walkway beside a reservoir. They typically used this area for their sports and games and observed that many young people walking by often joined in.

One stop in the tour was the grassy area where the neighbourhood held its junior youth camp this past summer.

With this in mind, the animators and families decided to hold the camp outside on the grass. While planning, questions arose around the ability of the junior youth to focus without tables and chairs, whether people walking by would be a further distraction, and even whether any of the junior youth could fall into the nearby lake. They were concerned that if they did it this way, the quality of the program would decrease. However, they reminded themselves that they were trying to act out of love for all the junior youth and if shifting the camp to the outdoors meant more would be able to come, it would be worth it.

They held their four-day camp outdoors, and no one fell into the lake. The animators read small sections of the texts and explored the concepts through arts, sports and games. One of the animators shared “It was messy and at times we didn’t even know how many junior youth were in the camp and how many were spectating. But then we saw that no matter how involved they appeared, the junior youth were attracted, stopped by the space and engaged in some way.”

Afterwards, the team estimated that a large proportion of all the junior youth in the neighbourhood had participated in the camp. Despite it being “messy,” it was open to all. With the colder weather, the junior youth program will need to move back indoors, but the team is still considering how their camps and gatherings can incorporate the outdoors to allow learning about reaching large numbers to continue. They still have questions around how to increase the quality of the camp and their own capacity for conversations, but their goal remains to reach every junior youth in their neighbourhood.

– Martharoot Malungu

[1] Dr. Rahmatu’lláh Muhajir recounting the words of the Guardian, published in Pioneering in a World Community: Quickeners of Mankind—A compilation prepared by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada, 1980, pp. 109-110.

[2] From the Universal House of Justice to the Conference of the Continental Boards of Counsellors, 29 December 2015.

[3] Ibid.