14 year old girl - incredible story!!!

We heard a nice story at prayers this morning in Haifa about Papua New Guinea. There is a Bahá’í youth there, a 14 year old girl, whose parents are also Bahá’í. This youth has been conducting children’s’ classes for children 12 and under and the receptivity has been great. She decided she wanted to take the Faith to the village where her parents are from and persuaded her parents to go along with this. She also wanted to involve the children she had been teaching so her parents approached the other children’s parents to tell them what their daughter was planning and to get permission for the non-Bahá’í children to participate. Apparently all the parents readily agreed because they were so very impressed with what this 14 year old youth was teaching their children. She had prepared 9 topics which she gave to the children and they each had to prepare something on the topic for presentation in the village. The topics included such things as an introduction to the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’u’lláh’s life, the Covenant, the laws of the Faith, Life after Death, God and the Manifestations. They also performed some skits and this 14 year old also sewed the costumes for the skits. When they arrived in the village over 100 people including the chief attended the presentation which was very well received. It was said that a survey was later carried out and three things were discovered: that youth are very anxious to share the teachings of the Faith through music and drama, that because of what the 14 year old was doing in terms of the children’s class a tremendous amount of trust had been built up—the society in Papua New Guinea is very family oriented and the families would not have allowed there children to travel to another village with the Bahá’ís unless there was a tremendous amount of trust and confidence. And the third thing was that where there is a great deal of receptivity one can share the message very directly as was indicated by the topics that were covered during the presentation.

Hope we can learn how to do this in Houston, yes in Houston!!!