The Wandering Two: Flowers of One Garden

The Flowers of One Garden
We went into Johannesburg for the Baha’I Holyday, the Birth of the Bab and stayed with a wonderful man named Malibongwe who lives on the grounds of the Baha’I National Centre. His wife and kids were visiting family in the US. The National Centre is amazing! It’s a huge property with a large hall, smaller meeting rooms, office buildings, a B&B, accommodation for staff and a medical clinic and beautiful grounds. The celebration was wonderful including a choir and we met many people. The next day before we came back to Zonke we were with Mali getting his car washed at a nursery/car wash owned by his friend Milton. Olivia and I decided to buy some flowers to bring back for the centre to make it beautiful. Milton suggested some hardy flowering shrubs and plants that would do well here and when he heard about the centre he said he would match our donation himself with more flowers, what a wonderful man! Mali drove us back with a carload of flowers and we put the kids to work. They were very hard workers leveling out the ground and digging it up to make a flowerbed, planting and watering. Mali spent the whole day here helping out and talked to the kids about the Baha’I Faith and also about importance of education. It meant a lot coming to them from a South African man, speaking to them in their language. We were able to make a long flowerbed on each side of the entrance gate to the centre and also a small flowerbed by the office. Pictures follow but we’ll put more in a month once the plants have grown and flowered more.
After consulting with the staff we decided to have a discussion day every other week with the older kids who come to the centre. Our first topic was teenage pregnancy and the youth had many insightful things to say; it went very well and we’re looking forward to the next one. We’ve also started a program with 5 of the older youth to train them to be peer educators in their community on HIV/AIDS. Each of the youth had to write a resume and cover letter and come for an interview. We will do training with them on HIV/AIDS as well as other topics such as gender equality, business and financial responsibility and human rights. The goal is that they will be able to give workshops and presentations at schools, clinics, community centre etc in Zulu to teach people about HIV/AIDS. Many of the youth tell us people are tired of hearing about HIV so we will help the youth to make their workshops interesting and share new information.
On a more serious note, my grandfather is very sick, please keep him in your prayers.
Love, The Wandering Two