doberman pizza. a baha'i (bahai, bahá'í) blog.

back at the Lachance family home for the night. The Lachances are awesome people with a storied and colourful past. Nicole and Marc (the mom & dad) became Baha’is in Granby when Denis and Jinous Allard were living there, back in the 70′s. They pioneered to Réunion island (in the Indian ocean) and afterwards to Gaspé (they helped form the first Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Gaspé, ten years after my parents pioneered there). Right now they are hanging out in Drummondville, pioneering yet again, and teaching the heck out of this place. If you follow my blog you’ll know about the many people who’ve been declaring their faith in Baha’u'llah in Drummondville recently. Anyway, I digress.

After a slow, lazy morning of catching up, we had lunch and drove on out to Odanak, a native reserve down by the mouth of the Saint-François River at the St. Lawrence Seaway. Nicole introduced me to a few of her good friends out there. One of them is Nicole O’Bomsawin, general manager of the Musée des Abénakis – a museum devoted to the culture and history of the Waban-aki Nation, as the local First Nations people are known. I also met a couple more of her friends on the reserve, including a very kind elderly couple – the husband went around showing me a whole bunch of family photos. In the middle of our visit, someone else came over to help them clean house – the webmaster of the Waban-aki Nation web site. We talked web stuff for a few minutes; that was cool as all-get-out. Odanak is like a little village, and the people are very friendly. It was refreshing to be among them. The company of aboriginal people is so precious and rewarding. Apparently Nicole and several other Baha’is often make friendly visits there, so the townspeople know them fairly well by know.

Before returning to Drummondville, we bought a dreamcatcher for another friend of Nicole’s, a Congolese guy called Guy. It was his birthday today. (surprise!) We went to bring it to him after dinner. We rounded out the evening by going to visit Natasha, another one of the pioneers in Drummondville, and her three (rowdy) sons. They were delighted, and so were we. We just sat around, enjoying each other’s company, swapping stories, looking at photos, playing rock-paper-scissors, and so on until bedtime. Natasha and company are leaving Drummondville in mid-July to join Jacky, the man of the house, in Tahiti. Jacky is originally from Tahiti, and I believe the two of them met in New Caledonia. I guess their wish to pioneer back to Tahiti finally got the better of them – and all the better. They will be missed here, that’s for sure. There’s always email, and MSN messenger. And of course, who wouldn’t be up for a month-long travel-teaching trip to Tahiti…?

Gabrielle and I just got done talking about pioneering. She works as a costumer (or tailor, or seamstress, or whatever you call it… she has a college diploma in fashion design, anyway), and she’s been thinking of leaving Drummondville sometime after this summer to go short-term pioneering somewhere – maybe Hong Kong, she mused, maybe the Caribbean. She was elected to the Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Drummondville this year, but were she to leave, there’d probably be enough people left to keep going, what with the six new adult Baha’is in town. It’s exciting stuff, to be sure. So much movement and growth in this little community, stuck on the highway like a blot between Québec and Montreal, and yet shining like a lamp with the fire of the love of Baha’u'llah. Baha’is here are rising to the challenges brought forth by the Universal House of Justice, and are striving in their own ways to unify humankind, bring together the diverse races, religions and nations, and light the fire of universal love and brotherhood among their friends and neighbours. It’s a privilege for me to be here today. It took me years to get here, and, just for today, I don’t regret a moment of it.