The Bahá’í community’s international governing council, the Universal House of Justice, has just written another wonderful letter to the Bahá’ís in Iran. The letter is both compassionate and challenging.

Equality of women and men

It calls on the beleaguered Bahá’ís in the land where the Bahá’í Faith originated in the 19th century to help “remove the barriers hindering the progress of women in society” in Iran.

For you, the equality of men and women is not a Western construct but a universal spiritual truth about an aspect of the nature of human beings, promulgated by Bahá’u’lláh nearly one hundred and fifty years ago in His homeland, Iran. It is, above all, a requirement of justice. This principle is consonant with the highest rectitude of conduct, its application strengthens family life, and it is essential to the regeneration and progress of any nation, the peace of the world, and the advancement of civilization.

The House of Justice reminds the Iranian Bahá’ís of their considerable achievements in emancipating women and calls on them to do more to “transcend those cultural practices that impede the progress of women”.

The goal of true equality is not easily attained; the transformation required is difficult for men and women alike. To this end, we warmly encourage you to continue to enhance your understanding of this principle and to strive to uphold it more fully in your families and in your community.

The letter closes by encouraging the Bahá’ís to work with their country-people who aspire to the same universal ideal of equality.

Responding to persecution

This is not the first letter written in recent months by the Universal House of Justice to the Bahá’ís in Iran. The letters remind the Iranian Bahá’ís of their great heritage as a faith community and as being in the forefront of social and economic development in Iran. And they call on the Bahá’ís to rise above the appalling persecution they are suffering and to put their energy and love into doing good for their fellow Iranians - and to work with their compatriots of any faith (or none) in doing so.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Universal House of Justice, Iran, persecution, gender equality, advancement of women, social and economic development

A sunny Sunday, our daughter and grandson staying with us, so a pub lunch is the obvious solution to the food problem. And it deals with the need to justify the calories by taking exercise.

So we walk the mile over to the White Horse in the Hertfordshire village of Burnham Green.

Is this habit forming?

Jacob, who’s two and a half, walks some of the way, but inevitably we have to carry him a fair bit of the way.

Jacob is drawn to the pub’s duckpond!

Piggybacking on the way home, Jakey thinks its fun to pinch his mother’s nose.

Glorious!

Technorati Tags: England, Hertfordshire, Burnham Green, White Horse, pub lunch

Children at New Ideal Academy in the Kakori Block, north of Lucknow

What do you do if you are a parent living in a village in a country where many state-run schools are appallingly bad? Do you just accept that your child might leave school without being able to count? Or do you hope that some good hearted people will set up a school in your village?

Well, the people in eight villages in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh are in luck. Eight people - six of them in their 20s - have set up village schools with the minimum of resources. As this story on the Bahá’í World News Service site says:

Most of them set up their community schools by seeking the help of the villagers for land and basic furniture and by employing educated but unemployed rural youth as teachers. In return, they promise to provide good overall education for very modest fee (for a high school student, for example, it might be 50 rupees, or US$1.25, a month).

They are doing this with the support of the Foundation for Advancement of Science (FAS), a Bahá’í-inspired NGO based in Lucknow, State Capital of Uttar Pradesh.

Bahá’í founders

Left: Ram Vilas Pal; Right: Vinod Kumar Yadav (right), founder of Glory Public School

The schools’ founders are not necessarily the kind of people one would expect to take on the challenge of educating village children. The FAS looked for educated but unemployed Bahá’í youth in the villages around Lucknow with motivation and perseverance.

Ram Vilas Pal, for example, is a TV technician. He set up the Nine Point School in Dasdoi. Brajesh Kumar, on the other hand, has a master’s degree in education. He could have had a comfortable job in the city but chose to return to his village:

I could have done many other things that would give me more money and involved less effort. But here I am doing something not for myself but for the village as a whole by bringing about moral, social, economic, and intellectual change.

Ram and Brajesh and the others are committed to transformation through education and want to achieve more than merely reproduce what is already available in other schools. Says Brajesh Kumar:

Our whole reason for starting these schools was not just to provide better quality of the same thing that is available everywhere but also to give something new and much-needed in the form of moral education.

This is proving popular with parents, who see their children developing moral character as well as learning to read, do maths and so on.

Teaching values

The need for mutual respect and equality is taught throughout the schools. The arts are proving particularly effective in helping childrren learn these values.

Schools have to be quite assertive in dealing with discrimination against girl children. Women do not traditionally leave the home in these villages and they certainly have not been receiving any education.

Ram Vilas Pal explains how he tackles this particular problem:

We visit the homes of parents in the village and talk to them about the importance of sending their daughters and not just their sons to school. And after a period of patient counseling, they understand.

Challenges facing schools

A big challenge for these schools’ founders is to keep their schools profitable in poor villages. They also have to face India’s social problems, such caste discrimination and gender inequality. However, with patience and persistence these problems can be overcome, and FAS believes the schools can bring about real change in their villages.

Future development

FAS plans to find another 20 “quiet revolutionaries” to set up village schools in Uttar Pradesh.

Read the whole exciting story here.

All photographs © Arash Vafa Fazli

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, India, Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow, education, schools, village, Foundation for Advancement of Science, morals, values