Posts from — January 2007

Jake with his first shoes

Originally uploaded by John Barnabas.

Jake is on his feet and walking now. It all happened quite quickly - he decided that walking was better than crawling, and he was away.

Grandma bought him his first pair of shoes today!

Technorati Tags: grandchildren, shoes

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And talking of Bilo, this post on his blog is enough to make your blood boil.

Today, the Ministry of Interior blamed the Baha’is for the so-called “crisis of the religion section on ID cards” and denied that there is a problem documenting “official religions.”

Well, it’s always good to blame the victims of human rights abuses for their plight, especially when you’re a government and you’re the abuser.

And now a new absurdity. The Egyptian Deputy Minister of the Interior, Essam el-Deen Bahgat, has proclaimed:

We will enter the religion of the father whether he was Christian or Muslim in the religion section for the Baha’i applicants. If he [she] refuses, then we will not issue an ID card, and he will have to deal with the consequences.

So that’s a good way to avoid having the word “Baha’i” appear on ID cards, isn’t it? Except that most of the Egyptian Baha’is are fourth or fifth generation Baha’is. How far back will Mr Bahgat go to avoid the taint of Baha’i on ID cards?

Bilo’s comment highlights the central problem for Baha’is in Egypt:

The travesty of this new development is that Egypt’s Ministry of Interior is instructing Egyptian citizens to lie on official documents on which, the application form clearly states that any false statements are punishable by imprisonment and large fines!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Egypt, human rights, religious freedom, ID cards

Erica and I were very pleased to welcome fellow Baha’i blogger, the redoubtable Bilo, author of the Baha’i Faith in Egypt blog, to our home for dinner on Friday evening. It was a great pleasure to meet and talk and get to know each other.

What’s more, we lit the wood-burning stove for him!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, blogger

I have just upgraded my blogging software to WordPress 2.1. WordPress is wonderful, but all upgrades bring problems. Some of my plugins are broken and each post appears three times. It will doubtless take me a few days to sort things out and get back onto an even keel.

In the meantime, I offer my apologies and wish you continued happy reading.

A few moments later
OK, I’ve turned off one of the plugins and that seems to have sorted the problem with each post appearing three times!

Technorati Tags: blogging, WordPress

Omid Djalili’s face is everywhere in London right now. Our famous Baha’i stand-up comedian and actor has a major tour on at the moment, and tour posters are all over London.

Omid Djalili’s tour poster almost opposite Harrods on London’s Brompton Road.

Technorati Tags: Omid Djalili, Baha’i, stand-up, comedian, Harrods

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The Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre has published an excellent report on the persecution of the Baha’is in Iran. You can download the full report here. If you don’t want the full report, you can download the executive summary here.

The story on Baha’i World News Service about this report begins in dramatic fashion:

The Iranian government appears to be laying the foundation for a new cycle of persecution against Iranian Baha’is, said a human rights organization specializing on Iran.

The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC) said in a report released last week that recent events in Iran, especially when viewed through the long history of religious persecution against Iranian Baha’is, is cause for alarm.

As the current court cases about ID cards for Baha’is in Egypt shows, Egyptian human rights defenders have been prepared to stand up for the Baha’is, who are claiming no more than their rights as citizens. It will be very interesting to see if human rights defenders in Iran will take a similar stance. So far there is no record of any prominent person, lawyer or politician in Iran, no matter how “liberal”, openly and unequivocally standing up in defence of the Baha’is in the country in which the Faith originated.

We hear all sorts of nonsense from Iranian speakers who come to the UK. For example, I myself heard ex-President Khatami claiming that there was freedom of religion in Iran and that no one was taken to court because of their beliefs. Other Baha’is have heard similar rubbish. But they are always disturbed by the questions we ask them and either circumlocute or stutter.

Technorati Tags: Iran, persecution, Baha’i, Egypt, human rights

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So, it came in the night - at last we have some winter weather! But the snow won’t last. It’s enough to create the obligatory travel chaos, but this is not a serious cold period.

A programme on BBC TV the other night examined what life and the weather may well be like in 2020, 2050 and 2080 if current global warming trends continue. Just to give you a sense of where we’re going, there’s a farmer in the south of England who’s planting olive trees and who has already cropped some mature black olives.

Sea levels will rise, storms and the resultant storm surges in the sea around the coast will get bigger; more and more land will be inundated. I worry for my grandchildren.

It’s too late to stop the changes that will hit us by 2020, but we can, if we work together in a systematic and united way, stop things becoming worse by 2050 and 2080. It puts me in mind of Baha’u'llah’s writings that compare the world to a human body. The whole body can flourish only if the parts flourish; and the parts can flourish only if the whole flourishes.

Later
As I thought, the obligatory travel chaos happened. As the Evening Standard headlined it:

BEATEN BY AN INCH OF SNOW

Rail and Tube bosses were slammed today over the London travel chaos caused by an inch of snow.

Here’s what was reported in the Daily Telegraph.

By the way, why do the media always use the word “slammed” when they mean criticized? Doors are slammed. An attacker might slam someone in the face. But somehow to criticize someone is always to “slam” them in media speak. I guess “slam” is shorter and sounds stronger. But it does draw rather bizarre pictures in my mind.

As it happened, my journey into London was relatively trouble free, if we ignore the closed ticket office, the queue for the one automatic ticket machine, which refused to read my credit card. Oh, and the four-coach train for a load that really needed eight coaches. So, many of us had to stand all the way to London.

No, it’s not a big deal, it’s only 30 minutes, but I was catching the first off-peak train of the morning. Lots of people catch the first off-peak train of the morning. It’s always crowded. But the train operators (First Capital Connect) seem unable to produce a train of the right length for the job. Mind you, we’re better off than the Bath to Bristol commuters who have to travel on trains run by another First Group company, First Great Western. But that’s another story, and not for now.

Anyway, got to London OK, not too late. But then there are delays, serious and minor, on every single Underground line. So the trip to my first meeting this morning took three hops rather than two and a delay waiting for a District Line train at Embankment.

Most of the delays were caused by multiple signal failures and points failures. You may wonder why an underground system is affected by snow. You may well wonder. And I’m going to tell you. (It’s at this point that my kids would groan and say that dad is going to give one of his lectures. But I’m not, I promise.) It’s for the obvious reason that much of the system away from central London runs on the surface.

So you would think that the powers that be would protect points and signals from failure because of bad weather. You would think that, wouldn’t you?

Tailender
Here are some readers’ pictures of the snow from the BBC website.

Technorati Tags: winter, snow, global warming, England, Baha’u'llah, London, First Capital Connect, First Great Western

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No, it’s not a joke! 2008 will be the International Year of the Potato, as declared in a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly.

The humble potato is a remarkable tuber and is one of the world’s most important foods.

You can read more here.

Let’s hope that the UN doesn’t make a terrible mash of the Year, otherwise we’ll all have had our chips!

Technorati Tags: United Nations, potato, food

I’ve just seen this story about Volker Grossmann, a dentist who’s a Baha’i. He and his family moved from Belgium to eastern Siberia some thirteen years ago to support the Baha’i community there.

The Grossmann family moved to the Russian capital in 1995, where they now live. Volker Grossmann opened his own clinic in 2001; his patients include big wheels, ordinary people and orphaned children.

It’s a fascinating story of the impact of a person’s faith on the way they live.

Tuesday 23 January, 2007

It seems you now have to subscribe to the Moscow Times to read this story. So here it is, but without the pictures.

Monday, January 22, 2007. Issue 3579. Page 15.
A Daring Dentist
By Michael Shipley
Special to The Moscow Times

Germany — Belgium — Siberia — Moscow: It may not sound like the typical route to success for a German dentist, but then, Volker Grossmann’s life has been anything but typical since he moved to Russia more than 13 years ago.

In 1993, he and his wife, Anke, were living in Belgium with their three children when they made the rather unusual decision to relocate to the East Siberian city of Chita.

“We came to Russia to serve the Baha’i faith,” said Grossmann, “to help support a newly established Baha’i community in Chita.”

Grossmann, 44, was born in a small village near Frankfurt and studied for his dentistry degree in Aachen, Germany. He speaks German, English, Russian and French, and refers to himself as a self-supporting Baha’i pioneer.

“It’s not like being a missionary who is trying to convince other people of his beliefs,” he said. “Rather, a Baha’i pioneer makes information available to those who are interested.

“My plan when I came to Chita was to open a dental clinic and offer continuing education for dental school graduates,” he added. “At that time in Russia, dental students didn’t have access to the same information available in the West. Materials and dentistry tools were in especially short supply.”

He ultimately found aid in the form of used dental equipment donated by the German Association of Dentistry. But there was a catch: the organization couldn’t provide the $10,000 needed to ship it to Siberia.

“The only thing I could think of “was to go to Germany, buy an old truck and some other old cars in order to have a convoy, and drive the equipment back to Chita, which I did,” Grossmann said.

That road trip lasted three weeks and involved more upsets and reverses than a Jackie Chan film. Yet even after this harrowing adventure, Chita bureaucrats and dentists continued their opposition to the first Westerner to live in their midst. Every effort was met with a lack of understanding or outright rejection by city officials, making it impossible for him to open his clinic. With no options left, and with more than two years and the last of his savings already invested in the effort, Grossmann turned his sights to Moscow instead.

It was with mixed feelings that he and his family finally left Siberia for the capital in 1995. By that time, the Baha’i community in Chita had grown, and they had made numerous close friends. But once he switched gears and moved to Moscow, things fell into place at lightning speed. He was offered a job at the European Medical Center, which included physicians and dentists in one building. That organization later opened a separate dental center next door.

“They said if I had a white smock with me, I could start at once,” he said. “The next morning, I was already treating patients.”

After five years working there and at other foreigner-owned dental clinics in town, Grossmann seized an opportunity in 2001 to open his own clinic, German Dental Care. The clinic seems worlds away from Siberia, with foreign ambassadors, Russian politicians, show business personalities and ordinary people of all nationalities coming for treatment.
“I like the variety of people,” Grossman said.

“It’s not boring. There are many tasks that in Germany I would not have. Professionally it’s more challenging, more interesting.”

His wife, a homeopath, works part time treating patients in the clinic as a separate practice. Two of their children have grown up and moved on — one to a nongovernmental organization in Kiev and another to a Baha’i project in Zambia — while the youngest attends the ninth grade in a Moscow school.

“He treats every patient as a member of his own family,” said Oksana Shulga, a former employee who now works in the personnel department at the Baha’i World Centre in Haifa, Israel. “When you hear Dr. Grossmann speaking to his patient, you feel that it is more than just medicine; it is a sincere desire to help that generates somewhere deep in the doctor’s heart.”

But the hard reality of doing business in Russia has proved challenging. “Always work with a lawyer,” Grossmann advised. “Otherwise you could get into trouble simply for not knowing the most recent laws.”

Difficulties notwithstanding, Grossmann and his staff have extended their good intentions to orphaned children as well, treating them free of charge one day per month.

“We try to have fun and just play around with the kids,” Grossmann said. “We also explain all the procedures to reduce their anxiety. One boy we treated later wrote me a letter saying he would like to become a dentist, too. These are really rewarding encounters, which make us feel we are doing the right thing sometimes.”

Technorati Tags: dentist, Baha’i, Siberia, Russia

I was pleased to read this obituary of the late and dearly loved Shamsi Navidi, a member of the UK Baha’i community until her recent passing.

Shamsi’s manifold services to the Faith, as a

Technorati Tags: obituary, Shamsi Navidi, Baha’i