Transcript:Gregory Dahl/Journal regarding Rúhíyyih Khánum’s visit to Haiti 1982

Transcript of: Journal regarding Rúhíyyih Khánum’s visit to Haiti, 19 October – 24 November 1982 by Gregory Dahl

Proofread onceDownload: mp3, Source: © Gregory C. Dahl

[0:00] This is the evening of October the 20th, 1982. About 10 o'clock and it is the second day of Rúḥíyyih Khánum's visit to Haiti, and I want to try to put down some recollections and thoughts even though I'm completely exhausted and not very cogent, I'm afraid. But I know that these the remembrances will disappear quickly. Khánum and Violette arrived yesterday with David Hadden and John Booth who’s come down from Canada to take some film and try to finish a project he has making a film about the fund. And they also brought John Currelly’s mother, who was known as Mu, down for a visit with her son and daughter-in-law. And they arrived about 1:00 in the bright little yellow plane of David's. He's been flying them around apparently to Green Acre and Greenland and Iceland all kinds of places in the time between the conference in Montreal and now.

[1:17] And we had three counselors who arrived to tour here yesterday, Ruth Pringle and Carmen de Burafato and Arbab arrived yesterday evening and was here today for the inauguration of the school. Khánum had decided to have five days of rest and relaxation. She said that she’d vowed to have some rest and she had even cabled the House that she would be taking a rest at my house here. And of course we've been frantically busy the last few weeks preparing for this inauguration and for her visit. And I spent - we had a long weekend here - I spent the whole long weekend trying to finish some work that had gotten delayed for my job here, and getting moved out of my room and getting it all prepared. It's amazing how dirty things are after you finish moving. So it was really quite a lot of work. And naturally, there was always last minute problems. There was a pipe on the plumbing for the pool, it broke, a plastic pipe and I was despairing of getting a replacement in Haiti, didn't know what we would do because I thought she might consider using the pool. And it did turn out yesterday morning I found a replacement part. Plumbers came for $50, put it in. I could've done it myself if I'd had half an hour, so that problem was resolved. And we've been having a lot of flurry of activity. The Baruks came up and filled the house with flowers yesterday morning, and everything was prepared. And so we came right here and been having a relaxed and very pleasant time with him.

[2:58] Today was the big event [laughs]. The reason that they had rushed to get here was the inauguration of the Anís Zunúzí school in Lilavois and it went remarkably well, considering that there were a few problems. But it was a very warm occasion and the local people, particularly the local mayor and all of his staff and so forth, showed up and do the local deputies. They were all very enthusiastic, and it would seem to be very well received by the community. And the whole thing was filmed, so I don't really need to go into it. But Rúhíyyih Khánum was fresh and very alive, poor [?] who put a tremendous amount of effort into organizing the thing. She came at our invitation, I guess, a couple weeks ago, and has been working tirelessly to try to get it all put together. And she had the place very well decorated, and a lot of arrangements made, but it was all on her shoulders and really unfairly concentrated in one person. And she'd just gotten terribly tired out and was working under extremely adverse circumstances and where she was staying and so forth, very difficult. And it was hot there, and she didn't get a chance to bathe before the meeting and other people were occupying the shower. A lot of lack of consideration, I'm afraid. And so she really had a lot to, had a lot to overcome. And she was, had decided that she was to be the chairman, and she did a very good job on the whole, but she made one terrible, terrible gaffe in referring to the president as Josh-Ack Duvalier instead of Jean-Claude Duvalier. And she was corrected by the mayor of [Quanticae?], the local town and still got it wrong. She was so tired. It was a, you know, it was a little unfortunate because it was so obvious. Anybody in this country hears his name so often you couldn't possibly get it wrong so it was very obvious that she'd come in fresh from someplace else, but-- and Rúhíyyih Khánum had made a point earlier of saying that it should be a Haitian who would be doing the introductions. And I said I didn't know who it was going to be. I really didn't know who it was going to be, so it wouldn't be my responsibility. And she got the point and she didn't say anything about it afterwards.

[5:16]We also, we had the Canadian ambassador come, which pleased me very much, and he seemed to like the occasion and was interested in what was going on there. And we hadn't really thought enough about dignitaries and they weren't properly seated and so forth, but I suppose there were no terrible mistakes made. On the whole, we're very, very pleased with it. Last night, we were sitting around after supper, talking in my living room. And Rúhíyyih Khánum was, we were discussing mostly the film John is making and his plans and Khánum was giving her advice. And he said something about footage he'd gotten of Edna True talking about the House of Worship. And also, I think, what's his name? Bruce Whitmore. Something like that, who works in the House of Worship and had some stories or anecdotes or something on film. And she said, "Listen, let me tell you the real story of the House of Worship." And this I wanted to put down before I forget it. She said she'd known Louis Bourgeois all her life and that he had this idea for a huge building which he presented at the exposition in Paris or some place or other and it hadn't been well received or it hadn't gone over or been of any use. And so we essentially warmed over the same idea and made this model for the House of Worship, which was proposed at this convention that was held. She mentioned a name of a hotel - I don't remember, I think it was in New York - in which all the various drawings were presented and the Baháʼís gathered to make a choice. And Mason Remey had all kinds of drawings all up and down this big hall. And in the end of the hall, it was apparently an anteroom, or a little side room in which Bourgeois had this model and it was beautifully illuminated, like it was moonlight, and he was extremely impressive in each. She said that, you know, as a - the way a child remembers little details, she remembered it. There were little people but in [chai?] or something on the steps of this model.

[7:17]And she said, you know, really Bourgeois was a designer, not an architect, and he made the forms for the latest work of the House of Worship himself, but he really didn't have concepts of architecture. She said several times how the architecture's in her own inner veins from her family, and it was very - she was very much aware. I guess her father probably said things, too, about this, and she said her father pointed out that the shape was entirely Roman, that people wouldn't be able to see the dome because it was too wide and not high enough, the original design. And it was also well beyond the means of the community. She got started on the whole thing because John had said something about how ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had said we must live within our means, you see. So she said, well, this was obviously far beyond the means of the Baháʼís, but it was so, so wonderful, so captivating the concept of the thing that all these laymen, not architects but laymen went for it completely and voted it in. It was not an architect's building, she said, but a layman's building. And then they had the problem of trying to pay for it. And she said that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had apparently written or somehow it expressed the hope - or maybe He didn't express it. I'm not sure exactly what she said, but it was His hope, she said. The Guardian had said that it was ‘Abdu’l-Bahá's hope that the building be built in His lifetime and that He was very sad when He received the word of the, or the design that they had chosen and realized that it was not going to be possible. But because it was the unanimous decision or the overwhelming decision of the Baháʼís of the West, he didn't say anything about it. So they went ahead with the thing and it wasn't until much later, I guess, that the Guardian said they had to cut it down. And she said it was very good because they shrank the girth of the thing and had made the dome higher in relation to the size. And it turned out really, quite all right, considering, but it was nothing that anybody would have undertaken that was really an architect. It was quite an interesting set of comments.

[9:26]This evening, everybody was very tired after the long afternoon, but we had a pleasant supper and then a little bit of coffee around the table. And Khánum was in a talkative mood and took her - she was often was snuggling up into some kind of a shawl that she had and her red dress that was made out of fabric that Moro had painted. It was originally intended for Bahiyyih and somehow she likes it and it found its way to her [‘’laughs’’]. And she was talking about some various trips and one thing or another and how mountain people in different parts of the world are so similar and how she's fascinated by the Andes, even though she doesn't know why they're not, you know, they're round, and not green. There's nothing particularly spectacular but she's fascinated by them, she said. And she told about on the Green Light Expedition how she had the same experience that I had had in [Saikaka?] with the inn where all kinds of people thrown into one room and the sanitary facilities was the pig sty out in back and how unpleasant that was. And then she said that that wasn't the worst trip she'd ever had. The worst trip was one with Hooper Dunbar. She wanted that to sound like Hooper, she'd said that to Hooper that she didn't want a sissy trip. It was in '68, I think she said, and she was 50. She was born in 1910 apparently. And he said it wouldn't be a sissy trip.

[10:44]So they took this trip up to the [?] in between Argentina and Paraguay, I guess somewhere up in there, and they took with them a Greek driver of a pick up truck and two young Persians who simply wouldn't be left behind. They were from a foreign background. They said they could be of use. And Ruth, I believe - oh no, it was Jan [ph]. Ruth Pringle may have been there. Anyway, her cousin Jan [ph] was there, I guess it was the two ladies, yes, and Hooper. And they - she said that she and Jan [ph] had made this Persian style mosquito net which goes all the way around and has a door that you can close down with a string so it's completely surrounded and nothing can get in. It's a great comfort to know that snakes and whatnot can't catch you. And she said that they asked directions to the - it was very arid place, full of all kinds of thorns, plants with little tiny thorns and plants with thorns six inches long that would go right through your tires. They had seven flat tires in the course of this trip and the spares they had were their own size so these young Persians had to patch the tires. They apparently had a patching kit, and they had to take them off and re-patch them every time they had a flat. And she said that they had to follow the tracks of cars that a car made the several days before, and later in the trip, it's just a cart that had gone in order to find their way through the desert. There was no road. They got to this village where 35 people became Baháʼís, 18-20 adults and children. And the people had absolutely nothing and she described their poverty was horrid.

[12:20]Anyway, it was quite a interesting account of her travels. And we had some airplane stories from David Hadden. It's really a very delightful, delightful group of people. I don't know really what one says, you know; when she first arrived, I was feeling a little nervous, as one does, having as a guest in one's home, such a historic and - how do you put it? You know? The closest thing we have, I suppose, in the Faith of royalty. And I also had a lot - I had this long letter to finish for my colleagues in Washington, which I knew was late and I was feeling under some pressure about that. And of course, all these arrangements for the school and everybody calling about one thing or another and wanting a picture or water for the speakers, the school and thousands of details, you know. And it gets to be too much, and as a matter of fact, this morning I had a sore throat and was worried that I might come down with something. Then I'll have it again tonight and I'd try to get a good night's sleep tonight, but it's very quickly, you know, Khánum is such a loving person underneath the sometimes gruff manner. She talks fairly often about how long she prayed for the ability to love mankind. And it's really a very warming feeling that one has with her and Violette and in all of their many services and experiences, you really feel the entourage of the Concourse traveling with her. And of course, she comes with all the prayers of the House of Justice and of the hope [highwhirl?] any. It's really a great honor to have her, but one has to get over that sensation or you're just frozen with the significance of it all, you know [‘’laughs’’]. And you have to be yourself and be relaxed. And once you get over that initial feeling, everything goes fine. It's very strange for me, you know, to be sitting at the head of the table with these [folk as?] visitors, but one does whatever comes one's way in this life. Well, better to get some rest in anticipation of whatever may be in store tomorrow.

[14:31]This is the next day, the 21st in the morning, and I haven't been feeling well today, so I decided to stay home and Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette have gone off with Danielle Alond [ph], the travel agent, the wife of the head of the Canadian aid office, to do some shopping at the Marché de Fer and expected back some time not too long from now. And John Booth [ph] and David had gone off with John Currelly and his mother to do some seeing of the country up towards Hinche, I think, so I have a precious moment here. I was just sitting down to put down a few more thoughts and the phone rang for about the 30th time so far today. I'm getting absolutely no rest, and I'm afraid it's going to go on and get worse. You know, it's sort of like being the switchboard of the operation here. I'm just worried about really getting sick. I've got a sore throat and other ailments, and I don't want to come down with something that would completely put me out of commission. We shall see. All night long I was bolting awake whenever the dog barks and whenever there was a noise outside. And I heard Rúhíyyih Khánum about 3:00 in the morning, talking and was afraid that she was ill or that wasn't feeling perfectly well or that she was being upset by the dog. She’d made comments about the dogs barking, and so on. And at 5:30 in the morning, a neighbor started chopping on a piece of wood with his machetes. He's putting an extension on his little house, and that rang, of course, across the quiet stillness and into all the rooms, and I was afraid that that would wake her but she said later that she hadn't heard it. Seem to have slept well and is looking chipper today, so I'm pleased about that.

[16:14]I had forgotten to mention last night another comment that she made yesterday. She was talking about inherited characteristics as opposed to acquired ones, and she said that Guardian was a firm believer that inheritance was more important than environment. And he talked often about qualities that go in families and so forth. And then she said that for instance, the Guardian who came from - well, his lines of inheritance were from the central part of Iran, well away from the coastline. He had absolutely no feeling for the sea. He liked mountains, and the sea just didn't mean anything to him, wherefore Rúhíyyih Khánum, she loves the sea. She went on in that vein. I thought that was an interesting point. This morning at breakfast, she was talking for a while about the period after the passing of the Guardian before the House of Justice was established. She said the port, the safe port I think she referred to it, into which they sailed to the boat of the Cause. And in that period, she said, it was extremely hard. If there are any problems on assembly, she says, it's nothing in comparison to what they had among the Hands. She referred to a - well, she said, for one thing, it was so hard to be required to make decisions when for so long she had been the secretary of the Guardian and implemented his decisions and he told her so forcefully on so many occasions that she was only a secretary who’s only putting down his guidance and that he was the Guardian, you see. And suddenly to be transformed into a member of a body that had to guide the Cause was extremely painful for her. And she mentioned one day, she didn't say when it was, and they had some very difficult times, difficult problems, apparently.

[17:55]She said that Bill Sears got off his chair onto the floor, fell or something, I don't know, and had a fit, she said, a real fit. She didn't explain exactly what kind of fit, but she said he pitched a fit. And she said that she just gave up and decided to go back to Canada and left the room, and she went up to clean out her, I think she said her grandfather's desk. It wasn't exactly clear what she was referring to, but anyway, there were some things, apparently, that she wanted to clean up and to get ready to go. And apparently the Hands sent Mr. Furútan after her to persuade her to stay, and she did little imitation of his very courteous manner and his extreme politeness - [phone ringing] there's the phone again - and within 15 minutes, she was apparently back in the meeting. [phone ringing] Well, that was the national office in Wilmette, wanting to know my street address, and I said that there wasn't one up here in the mountain. Apparently, the House wants to send something, probably some flowers or something, and then I suggested the National Center. Yesterday, I was sending Rúhíyyih Khánum's cable to the House. It's really amazing to be in the center of such history, you know. Extraordinary, but very demanding, my goodness. I was thinking I should mention, it's so, you know, to have someone like that just here all the time, instead of just meeting her in a meeting or something, you feel so completely self-conscious. You know, your whole life is sort of there to be examined and it seemed to me it must be just a very small fraction of what it was like to be in the presence of one of the Central Figures of the Faith. It sort of rubbed off, I suppose, in the holy family, but that tremendous test that some of the people who met Bahá’u’lláh, for instance, referred to as having your inner self feel so exposed, you know. And some people passed the test and some people didn't and I'm beginning to get a glimmer of what that, that sort of feeling is like, you know. You can't sort of postpone until the end of your life the day of judgment; it seems to sort of come at you and you feel very self-conscious when you say something because it may not be quite right. And Rúhíyyih Khánum will certainly tell you right off if she doesn't think that's the right thing to be thinking [‘’laughs’’] or the right thing to be saying, you know. She's very courteous. She's very pleasant. I'm not saying that she isn't, but you just have that feeling of self-consciousness.

[20:28]She also talked at length last night about the coral reefs that she goes to a lot, apparently and loves to go snorkeling in the Red Sea and was talking quite some length about the overwhelming fascination and beauty of the creatures in the sea. And she did an imitation of this octopus that she was looking at, and it was looking at her. It then suddenly swam away to another rock and pushed itself up on its eight legs. And she demonstrated and acted like the octopus. [laughs] Terribly funny, and said that it looked at her and she looked at it. And she described some big fishes that propel themselves by undulating their bodies that she saw when she turned around once to it and looking at her, and she was just thunderstruck at the wonder and the beauty of it. Well, it seems to be her idea of a rest, and she's told to [?], apparently, who just called twice that there should be radio interviews arranged, but she didn't say when she was free, and she's already filled up her time. She's gone off shopping this morning. She got the counsellors this afternoon, and this evening she's going to see some Persians who've come to visit, including Madame General Marly [ph] from La Salle [?], and this lady Colastane [ph] I think her name is, from somewhere in Florida who did the exquisite baked enamel mural or tile, whatever you call it, a mosaic mural at the school. Rúhíyyih Khánum said she's the best quality that you could find anywhere in the world, top notch. She was very famous in Iran for this work, although she disagreed with the quotations that were on there and all that sort of thing. And I think there's some other Persians in town. She's going to meet with them. And I don't know what she has planned for tomorrow, Heaven help us. We shall see. It's quite a pace.

[22:23]Well, it is now Saturday afternoon, a little bit after four o’clock and Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette had gone up for a rest. And so I take this opportunity to try to catch up a little bit. I got behind, and I'm not going to be able to remember all the things that were discussed and so forth. These have been exceedingly full days the last few days, but at least try to put down a few things that stand out. Thursday, we had the counsellors for lunch, three of them. That was Farzam Arbab, Carmen de Burafato, and Ruth Pringle. And that was quite an interesting occasion. Rúhíyyih Khánum didn't really have very much in the way of what you would call business to discuss a few things. They talked about the need to utilize travel teachers better and to plan them better and not send too many people bunched together wherever they couldn't be absorbed by a community. In fact, the Continental Pioneer committee wasn't working properly and recently been moved again, needed to have some attention paid to it. And, gee, I don't remember what else, but mostly they talked about mutual friends and things of that kind and very relaxed. A little bit on the formal side, I must say, although, of course, Rúhíyyih Khánum has traveled with Ruth a great deal, and she doesn't know Farzam very well and was eager to get to know him a little better. She's very impressed with his work and so forth, but she didn't hesitate to correct him just as abruptly as she corrects any other Baháʼí. I think it was at that lunch that she had said something about the cook and she looked at me and she said, "Well, you know, Greg always lands on his feet." And then she paused, and then she said, "At least in terms of household help." And I was really tickled because I hadn't heard that expression. And I do land on my feet when I physically fall, generally always. Hadn't had a chance to tell her but it was an interesting remark.

[24:27]She said a whole, whole lot of interesting expressions, some of which I wrote down last night and I put down a few couple minutes. The counsellors stayed quite a while, but then Rúhíyyih Khánum got late, got tired and around four o'clock, she went up. And unfortunately, my car had not come back. I told the guy to be here at 3:00 or 3:30 and by 4:15 or 4:30, finally showed up. There'd been some delays and he was meeting our fiscal expert George Tosan [ph] that the plane was arriving that afternoon. And so we waited around a little while and had a nice further talk and some more coffee and a chance to chat a little bit, which was very pleasant. I haven't had a chance to get to know Carmen Burafato at all before and she's very concerned about the financial crisis in Mexico, and every opportunity was asking me my opinion about investments in real estate and what was gonna happen to the convertibility of the peso and things like that. It was kind of humorous. And Farzam was still concerned very much about the question of the positive thinking movement that seems to be attracting some of the Baháʼís here. And he mentioned that to Rúhíyyih Khánum and was very pleased that she agreed with his judgment that this was potentially very serious and divisive kind of problem and that she was happy to know about it and would take the opportunity to mention it later in her talks with the pioneers and so forth.

[25:53]I had stayed, I guess I mentioned already, I stayed home on Thursday because I was just completely exhausted and had a sore throat and was worried about getting completely ill, not able to be of any help. So I just stayed home that day. In the evening, we had dinner. Well before that, I finally got a chance to take a little bit of a nap after the counselors went, and was awakened not having gotten to sleep yet by an urgent call from Carrie [ph]. And that's when we received the news that Don had read in the paper that day - it was Thursday - about the murder of Dan Jordan [ph] in the New York area. That was very distressing. I told Violette who'd already gotten up, and Rúhíyyih Khánum came down after a few minutes. I was standing there in my bathrobe and slippers, and we speculated about that and so forth. Then we had dinner, just the three of us, and it was very sad because the - oh no, it was the next morning that David Hadden and John Booth left, but they’d gone out to dinner. We didn't know until the last minute what their plans were, but they were invited out by Boo [ph], John Currelly’s mother. And so they didn't come for dinner that night. He arrived rather late, and so we had dinner alone and then following that is a group of Persians that I mentioned, including Mrs. Colastane [ph] who brought a little, a small single piece. It's baked enamel that she does on copper, apparently. She brought a gift for Rúhíyyih Khánum, a dove breaking out of the bonds of persecution or something like that. And I left them alone because they were talking in Persian. I didn't want my being there to cause them to talk in English. And so I read a few papers and had a few precious moments of relaxation after all this activity. And when I came out later, Rúhíyyih Khánum said, "What are you? Afraid of the Persian language or something?" [laughs] And insisted that I join them. I said a prayer for Dan Jordan. Very, very pleasant occasion. Mazjoub is a lovely, lovely man. He came with his wife, who's the daughter of one of the Hands of the Cause. I can't remember if it's Kházi‘ or who. Anyway, she's lovely, lovely young woman. Hadn't had a chance to meet her, and they have two adopted kids that they brought: a teenage girl who's quite tall now and apparently dotes on her father, and a little boy, very nice family. So, and there was some other people, I didn't know exactly who they were, about six or seven of them altogether. And the servants had already gone to sleep or had gone to their rooms anyway. I had to get them up to serve tea and coffee. Haven't been quite able to keep everybody up to Rúhíyyih Khánum's pace, up in the morning and going until quite late at night. It's kind of hard to do the proper host types of duties. They had this ancient driver in an ancient, a huge American style car. It took us forever to get them up the mountain, had to get gas and one thing or another and kept Rúhíyyih Khánum waiting.

[29:11]Friday morning, I was feeling a little bit better and felt I really ought to take care of some of the formalities of my job. So I had breakfast ahead of everybody else and saw them as I was leaving, said goodbye to John and David, and went down to the Rte Bolele and got George Tosan [ph] and went with him for a nine o'clock appointment with the Minister of Finance, who was late because of a tedium. And we spent some time there, and about half an hour with the minister and an hour with the director general, the newly appointed Mr. Jose [ph], and then over to Central Bank for an 11:00 appointment with the governor. And I had another 11:00 appointment in which I hadn't had time to cancel. Some man on the minister staff Prospaire [ph] who's waiting for me, so I saw him for a few minutes and went and talked to the governor for more than an hour and came back and finished with this fellow Prospaire [ph]. And that all took until about 1:00, I suppose. And I was really exhausted. I was having a hard time keeping awake with Andre [ph] and Tosan [ph] talking on and on about sugar and other irrelevant things. And then what should happen? I still had this guy Prospaire [ph] in my office, and the door opened. And the messenger popped his head in and said, "There's a Mrs. Rabbání who wants to see you." So I was saying that I had this guy - oh this is second side recording in the afternoon of Saturday, October 23rd. I had this filmed in my office, and was told that Rúhíyyih Khánum was waiting and there she was in the hall, the central bank with Violette. And they said they didn't want to disturb me and when I was planning on going back up to the house. And I was planning to leave as soon as possible anyway because I was really reaching my limits, so I said probably in about 20 minutes. And I sat them down in the conference room around a big table and went back and tried to finish with this fellow quickly. And that just threw a monkey wrench in all of my plans because I had the cable that she had prepared to send to Doctor Cameron [ph]. And hadn't had the chance to do that. I had, I was out of the office for a day, had a big pile of mail and all these things to do, you know, chaos in there. And I've been in the office. Hadn't had any time yet in the office, but I was happy to have an excuse to go home.

[31:26] So I finished up with those things and drove back up the mountain with Rúhíyyih Khánum. Terrible traffic, took a long time, and it started to rain as we came through Pétion-Ville and just hit the sharp curve on the [?]. I honked, as I always do and the great big American car was, diplomatic car was coming down the other way. And the guy put on his brakes and slid, and he just missed me. I just got out of his way, went real fast, and he must have missed my rear end by a fraction of an inch, if only. I was sure he was going to hit me. His wheels were turning, but he was just going straight, and it was kind of a close call. It wouldn't hurt anybody. He would have spent a fender bender. And so we got home nicely and had a little lunch. And then I had these young fellows from the central bank who had been messing up the figures that they've been trying to prepare the last number of months, were very concerned because they had the same problems in August that they had had in the last months. And they insisted on coming up to my house, which was unprecedented, and explaining the problems to me. So they arrived about 3:30 and stayed for more than an hour explaining these things and Rúhíyyih Khánum had gone up to sleep with Violette. Oh, and I didn't explain what had happened. It's that in the morning, the jeep, John's Jeep, was much too full with all of the baggage and everything to take them down the mountain, which was what they were hoping to be able to do. So they apparently set out with Diuso [ph] on foot, going down [La Montanoir?]. And they went, they say, about halfway on foot. And Rúhíyyih Khánum said that she really needed the exercise. It was wonderful, that stretch up from my house before you get to the road and go down again. It's quite a climb.

[33:11] And they were about halfway down, and the beautiful, one of these commuter type minibuses came by that are becoming more popular here, taxi type thing. And the fellow offered to take them down to Pétion-Ville for 50 cents, so they gratefully accepted. And then when they got to Pétion-Ville, they asked him if he could take them all the way to Port-au-Prince And he said, "Sure, for a $1.50." Which I think was for the two of them. And so they were really in luck. That's very unusual. And they were taken all the way down. And as they came into town, they passed the cafe where they'd had coffee sometime before and Rúhíyyih Khánum remembered it and asked him to stop and got out. And they had a nice coffee and they enjoyed themselves. And then they found their way with no trouble. Had a little map, they found their way to the central bank, and they were concerned. They’d called me several times, apparently, from different places. Oh, they stopped in the Nader Art Gallery and looked at some paintings and so on. And they tried to call me and I'd been out all morning, so they were worried that I was going to go back home before getting their message. So they came directly to the central bank and found me, and were very pleased with themselves at having negotiated so well in a strange city. So they had a long nap. Rúhíyyih Khánum slept for more than two hours, which she really needed. And I had a nice hours sleep myself, which was very much appreciated. Friday afternoon, yesterday afternoon. And we had a very pleasant dinner, the three of us.

[34:43] And then in the after dinner, Linda Gershuny, and John Currelly came up to discuss the possibilities for the plans for later in her stay in Haiti. The evening before when we had dinner together, I'm feeling much more relaxed with her now, and was starting to express myself on various subjects which she appreciates. And I explained to her the intricacies of the personality relationships and how the National Assembly might feel usurped if she had made decisions about her trip with the committee or with other Baháʼís, and that, you know, somehow we should negotiate so that she got information from Baháʼís or consulted with the board members and then left the final decisions to the National Assembly. And she understood all that very clearly and agreed, and so we trimmed down. The planned meeting had been larger; we trimmed it down to John who had offered to take her around. And she had accepted his offer of his jeep and who had prepared this little map and information for her and Linda who’s a board member. We had a long meeting until about 11:15, going over all these intricacies of who can translate and who's free what days and what's possible in different places and what cars are available and how this one can fit into the other. And she doesn't want too many white faces and pioneers trailing after her, how to keep that to a minimum and still make everything work and have balance and keep everybody happy and not forget anybody or leave anybody out, but to do what she feels is priority, and it was really very involved. And she had a pad of paper and she wrote down on the left the dates and the days of the week. She said this is the way the Guardian planned his trips and he always knew exactly what was going on because he put very clearly on a piece of paper the travels and the appointments, and so on. When he went to Switzerland, he’d put, he had a doctor's appointment in such and such a time, such and such a day.

[36:44]So we laid it all out like that and went through and took a very long time, but it was extremely productive and I’ve been very, very impressed at the way that she is going about this visit. She feels that her visit in Haiti is very important and she wants to give it as much time as it requires. And she doesn't want to waste her time but she wants to do it thoroughly, and that means very much, not only geographically but also in terms of the people, that she's extremely aware and concerned and sensitive about the needs of each of the different people who are active in the Cause here and wants to have the proper opportunity to encourage them in their work and correct any little problems that there are and so forth. And wants very much to know about all the different situations and then work out ways of contributing. So she's having, this was supposed to be her days of rest, and she wasn't trying to, you know, to get into all of this. But starting next week, she's going to have a very full itinerary. And it's going to, hopefully, if she doesn't have time cut short, do fantastic things for this community. It's very clear the way she's going about planning it, fantastic. And she wants to have little dinners with people who maybe need a little encouragement or need a little correcting of something or other and visit others and so forth. It's very, very nice. And she has in mind to - she liked the idea of opening the island of the South Coast Île-à-Vache,, and so we're planning hopefully a trip there with a large group of people to impress everybody. And she wants to spend as much time as possible with the two capable Haitians who can help with the translation. And she wants to encourage René Jean-Baptiste, the auxiliary board member and George Marcellus, secretary of the National Assembly.

[38:44]And she's very interested. She said the reason she came back to Haiti is to go to Hinche, where Hector Lupe [ph] lives, old member of the National Assembly who, the last time she was here, said that nobody ever came to his area to teach. And it's more or less true. Arnold goes up there, but he hasn't really gotten a team going, and they seemed to go around in the same old circles. And nothing is really developed and then they've only been there once and quite a long time ago. It's harder to get to than the places on the main roads. And she has in mind to go to this whole area of the country between Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien, centered around Hinche and spend at least four days and do some teaching in that area, open up areas and so on. So that's very interesting, you know? And then, but she also wants to have enough time to spend with the Baháʼís, the Pioneers in Cap-Haïtien and in the Artibonite where George comes from, in Cayes in the south and strip to Île-à-Vache, and Jacmel, and a few villages on the way to Cayes that John and his team have been working on, and also here in the city in between times, resting in what she calls home or her home base which is my place, and visiting with some other pioneers and having a meeting with the pioneers and meeting in Port-au-Prince so they don't feel left out, and so on and so on. So it's really a very, very fine plan, very thorough and I'm most impressed. I hope that she keeps it up without getting ill or anything.

[40:16]After she went to bed about 11:15, really exhausted, but she didn't want to, you know, none of us wanted to leave it half-baked without reaching some kinds of feeling of having accomplished the whole thing, getting all the pieces fit together. I persuaded Linda and John to stay a little longer so I could type up this cable to Dr. Cameron [ph], and one of them could take it down today so I wouldn't have another hour and a half trip downtown to try to fit in. And they very kindly did that. And John was going to take care of delivering it to the [Telecall?] office. And I slept very soundly. Rúhíyyih Khánum said don't worry about getting up early in the morning, so it wasn't quite as long a sleep as I would have liked, but together with the nap, I'm beginning to feel like a human being again. It was very nice and more of an equilibrium, so we didn't rush things this morning. Had a pleasant breakfast. The stupid people who repaired my pool came honking up twice with their big loud truck in the middle of this wonderful breakfast and wanted payment, which they charged $40 for labor and turns out they worked about half an hour according to [?], so I'm certainly not gonna pay it. I'm sure that's why they're being so pushy about asking for the payments. It's ridiculous. Here it turns out, you know, people don't have any kind of rules about what they charge. They just charge whatever they think they can get. And if you bargain with them, even though it's written on a piece of paper, you can very likely get it reduced.

[41:42]So we had a very leisurely pleasant breakfast. And among other things. Rúhíyyih Khánum wanted to know about my business, and we talked about, a bit about economics. I don't remember if it was last night or this morning. And she had a very forceful or interesting accounts, which I should mention she said, with the priceless pearl. She had intended to give it to George Ronald [ph] to publish, and it had been reviewed by a committee of three people, three members of the House of Justice, David Hofman, Ali Nakhjavani, and Ian Simple, mostly because it's unusual, she said. That's never, that's not the case. Usually the books of the Hands are reviewed by other Hands, as I take it by Paul Haney. Paul Haney read it, too, because it needed to be reviewed according to the usual pattern. But there was a chapter on the relations between the Guardian and the state of Israel, the letters exchanged and so on. And it was very sensitive material, and she was particularly concerned about that. It turns out the House took that out and it can be published later when the situation improves but it was too delicate for the Baháʼís in the Arab countries and so forth. And that all these people had given suggestions about English and one thing or another. And she said this committee of the House, there was one point that they made that she did not accept. And they wanted her to - some minor point, she said, like whether the dust of the Shaykh Ṭabarsí has a spiritual significance or something like that. She said that was her understanding. She had a right to her understanding about the teachings, and they accepted her point and didn't press it. But everything else she accepted their suggestions.

[43:33]And then she said they were working with Marion [ph] and it was very difficult. She said Marion [ph] had her own ideas and simply, at one point, simply wouldn't publish something the way Rúhíyyih Khánum had written it. And finally Khánum got fed up with that and took it away from her and gave it to the British Trust but with the elaborate contract that the thing was to be nonprofit and the, I think, the hardback sales subsidized this soft cover or something like that. Anyway, she tried to work out something that she thought was reasonable arrangement. Then she gave The Desire of the World, her new book to George Ronald [ph], partly because she felt sad or contrite about taking away The Priceless Pearl from them. She said that she was worried that it was going to ruin her personal relationship with Marion [ph], but it didn't have any adverse effect, and she was pleased about that. And, she said, for the cover of Desire of the World that she had designed it, even though it has Audrey Marcus, I think, as the designer. Audrey had done the execution but Rúhíyyih Khánum had designed it, and she had a big argument with David Hofman about putting Bahá’u’lláh at the top. David said that title has to go in the first third, and the author underneath. And she said, "No, no, that's what I want." She'd gone through her father's books, I think and then had seen a book that had a cover arranged that way and she liked that. And she's very pleased with herself. She thinks that it's a play on words to say Bahá’u’lláh, the desire of the world. Makes it sound like the author is part of the title, if you see what I mean and she likes that. And she feels it's a very important book, The Desire of the World. And she was very interested in the George Ronald's operations and how they market. She wants to know if we sell their books and I explain to her how that works and that I was very impressed with their business procedures and so on. She thought, she didn't talk much about it but she expressed great frustration with the American trust and said that she thought that when they built their building, that that was really sinful to take the profits of Baháʼí Publications and put them into a fancy building.

[45:37]I'm forgetting lots of things which I'm sure will occur to me later. I've skipped over - I made a few brief notes because I knew I was going to forget things, and I've skipped over a couple of things here. And on Thursday, I think during the luncheon with the counsellor, she talked about her trip to - well, she talked about three, what? A closed canopy jungle, which very much interest her. She wants, it's one of the things she wants to see before she dies. And all the counselors were vying with each other to say that there was a closed canopy jungle in this part of Panama or in that part of Colombia and so on if she would come there to see it. And it's a type of jungle, apparently where at the level where you walk, it's completely open. And then there are three tears of foliage, including the upper tier, which is completely closed. It's not at all unusual. And then she was ruminating that perhaps she had seen, she thinks that she may have seen a closed canopy jungle, although she wasn't thinking about it at the time, when she and the Guardian were traveling by land during the war across Africa to get back to the Holy Land in the Congo somewhere in Zahir. Apparently, they stopped and went on a little side excursion to see some jungle. They were both interested in that, she said. And they were walking along and she thinks that maybe in that place, that was closed canopy jungle. And she said that she saw a millipede and that she doesn't like centipedes at all but she thought it was a magnificent millipede, and she demonstrated it was maybe 10 inches long. And she poked the thing and it rolled up into a tight ball. And so she picked it up, and she said, "You should have seen the Guardian of the Faith in horror telling her to put this thing down." And she said, "No, Guardian, it's quite safe. It's a millipede. It's not gonna hurt me." He said, "Ah, but you must put it down." And she was demonstrating how he, how he put it. And the other people, apparently, who were with them were also horrified that she would pick up such a thing, but she really did like it.

[47:33]I can't think of anything else offhand. And after breakfast today, we got in the car and I took Leon [ph] with her box down to do some grocery shopping, gave her enough money to take a taxi up the hill, and took Dioso [ph] down. And then we went up the mountain to Kenscoff. And we got to the - oh we stopped at this sculpture gallery on the way. And then we got to the Baptist Mission about 11:00. It was still early for lunch, so we went on up, and drove through Kenscoff and bought a few vegetables, and just generally looked at the little town and turned around and came back, and stopped and took a picture of that blue church. That's sort of interesting the way it's painted. She said she'd never seen a church painted that way. And then we stopped at the Mission and did a little shopping and had a very, very pleasant lunch there. And Hans Surgen [ph] and Matty Thimm were there, and this, what's her name? Robinson or something? He's a young American woman who has traveled teaching here with her young son from the States. And they were happened to be there and we were pleased to see her. And she said some very encouraging words to the Thimms about their work and the inaugurations and so on, and said that she wanted to have a chance to see them more before she leaves. And this little woman, I can't remember her name. This Indonesian lady who has been a Baháʼí but has since withdrawn from the Faith, that Linda had taught, who sells potted plants and flowers up there, joined us for lunch with her sandwich that she’d brought. We have this very nice ham and cheese sandwich that they have and then some ice cream cones, which were soft ice cream that they make themselves with a very hard chocolate covering. And the chocolate covering had melted the ice cream underneath it, so when you try it, this cone is very soft. So the thing was melting rapidly, and it was very hard to bite into the chocolate without making all the ice cream come out from underneath. And the chocolate covering of mine eventually fell off with half the ice cream in it, and my hands were just covered with goo. And it was marvelously messy, and Rúhíyyih Khánum was having an equally enjoyable time, and so was Violette, although Violette got some chocolate on herself, I think.

[49:45]But we all had a, had a great deal of fun with all of that, and had a very good "citronel" tea. Then Khánum just likes very much being relaxed and not having to fuss about being too formal, and so on. She said several times this morning, we had crepe for breakfast and she put all kinds of butter on it. And she said, "Well, if you're gonna sin, you may as well sin properly, not do anything halfway." She said, "If I'm gonna have a crepe, I'm just gonna put plenty of butter on it." [laughs] She's so funny. And I think that she likes the heavy sort of rich food that Leon [ph] cooks here, but she also knows that she's put on too much weight. And it's interesting to see her negotiating that one. So we had a thoroughly sinful meal. She said it's her one ice cream cone of the year, annual ice cream cone. And they drink lots of coffee, these people, which interest me. And then we drove leisurely down the mountain, stopped and looked at this funny little gallery. She took a picture there. This looks like a tomb or something out of Middle East. And then we stopped at the Monet Gallery, very fancy place. House belongs to Magloire, the president before Jean-Claude’s father François Duvalier and met the Puerto Rican, ah, the Dominican man who lives there. Looked at all the painting, she said she didn't like any of those paintings but was very interested in who was famous and what was sold to the wealthy clients that they cater to. And she liked very much the fancy tropical flowers that they had arranged there and some of the antiques and so on, and generally just had a very pleasant, relaxed afternoon.

[51:26]We stopped down at Pétion-Ville. They wanted to buy some fruits, and we got some mandarin oranges, which were rather sour and some real grapefruits, chadèk, and oh, some flowers. They bought some flowers. And when we got home, they fussed around for about half an hour, arranging all these flowers, and rearranging, putting roses in different vases and one thing or another and having a good time with that. Then we sat down and had some tea. And Rúhíyyih Khánum had bought some sugar cane on the way up the hill, and she had also some cookies from the mission. And after a little while, Leon came out with a sugar cane and they've all been chopped up in edible pieces. And, my goodness, Rúhíyyih Khánum went through almost this whole thing, she and Violette. There was a length of cane maybe five feet long that had been cut up into a plateful of pieces and they ate almost all of it. And she said, "It's very good for you, you know." She's big on brown bread, it turns out, and raw sugar, for some reason. I don't know why, and just loves sugar cane and thought that I was certainly not doing justice to myself to only eat 3-4 pieces and I find it too sweet after a while, you know. It's too much. And she sat back, slouched back in this big leather chair that I have there and asked me to read the chapter in Neil Morrison’s [ph] book about Louis’s [ph] and Gregory's [ph] abortive effort to pioneer in Haiti. So I read in the chapter. It's quite short. And she interrupted here and there, remarked on one thing or another. The word ghetto, she said, was a modern word and it didn't belong in the description of something that was happening in 1936 and how fine the services of Louis and Gregory were, she said, and how she'd known them and always took them places and so on. She was very interested to see the picture of him in Montreal, but she couldn't see very clearly who the different faces were and was speculating on who each person in the picture was.

[53:12]So and after that, we talked a little bit about Bahiyyih and Paule and Violette's nightmare. She had one last night about Paule taking Mary away from Bahiyyih and one thing or another. And then they retired a while ago to get a nice rest. So that brings us up to date for the moment. And to repeat, this is the afternoon of October the 23rd, Saturday in [La Montanaire?], Port-au-Prince, Pétion-Ville, Haiti. Still the same time. I forgot to mention that yesterday morning after we got back from downtown, there was a message that that Ali had called and that Rushin [ph] and René [ph] had had a little boy, and they'd hoped for a little girl. I guess they have a boy already. I'm not very clear about all that's going on in that family, but anyway, Violette is now a grandmother again and was very pleased. And they decided to call Ali and try to get more details and didn't get through for a while. But apparently later on, they did get through and he confirmed the news about Dan Jordan [ph] and said that it seemed from what they could tell, that it was just an ordinary act of violence. Nothing directed against the Faith. So there's always a lot happening around Rúhíyyih Khánum, I guess.

[54:49]Well, this is now Wednesday evening about bedtime, the 27th of October 1982 and I'm going to have to try to catch up a little bit. And I think the most successful thing would be to try to work backwards. I've made some very brief notes on little slips of paper to try to remind myself of a few salient things, but I just couldn't keep up with the making of tapes for a couple of days there. I got extremely tired, and there was just no, no time for it. So, it's a little difficult, I suppose, later to this and to this mangled order, but it will have to do. I took Violette and Rúhíyyih Khánum to Jacmel yesterday afternoon, and today, I left them there and came back. Today has just been an ordinary work day, and I was just feeling completely dragged out. It's been a very, very full week, but I'm beginning to, later today, to feel human again and I hope to be recovered in a couple of days. Yesterday, I went down to the office and sent the car back with my driver Oragean [ph] who picked up the ladies and their luggage, and came down and met me at the bank around 3:00 or 3:15, something like that. And then I drove them to Jacmel over the mountains. And it was a sunny day and Port-au-Prince looked very unthreatening, except when we turned and headed towards the South, there were very dark clouds on the mountains. And as we wound up into the mountains, it began to rain lightly. And then we went into the clouds, and there was thick fog and very wet and just the sort of feeling that one would expect in a jungle type of area, even hard to see for a little while there. And then we sort of emerged a little bit from the clouds. It was still raining lightly. The clouds were much higher, though, and the sun was shining through and there was no rain at all in Jacmel.

[57:01]We could see Jacmel down below in the distant space and sunlight, and the sunlight coming through the clouds produced a magnificent rainbow. We could see the entire thing from left to right in more or less the same place where I saw a rainbow last time I went over with my mother and took a picture of it. And even on the left side, there was a double rainbow. The second one was very faint, but we all remarked on how beautiful it was and really felt like going through the difficult trials and tribulations of mankind and coming out on the other side into the light and beauty of the Baháʼí future. It was a very pleasant drive, and I felt that always, I always feel a little bit uncomfortable, I must say, when Rúhíyyih Khánum gets on to certain subjects, because I just have no idea, I'm at a loss as to what to say. And when I'm driving, it's difficult, particularly because I have to concentrate on the road and I'm very conscious of how precious the passengers are. Now, I don't want to do anything stupid and endanger their lives. And Rúhíyyih Khánum was talking a little bit as we were leaving the city early on in the trip, which is about a two-hour trip, about the Guardian, and I've never known what to say when she talks about the Guardian. I feel really dumb just sitting there and not saying anything, not contributing to any kind of conversation, but I'm really always at a loss. And she spoke, as she has many times before, about how the Guardian was reserved when he was with the Baháʼís, but when he was with his family, he was adorable, she said, in many ways. And I asked her whether the Guardian had been reserved before he became the Guardian, whether that was a question of character or something that related to the Guardianship. And she said no, she thought it was the Guardianship, that presumably beforehand he was more like he was with his family. She said a great many other things, but I can't remember now. The sort of the many conversations begin to merge together, and I'm sure that if I could think later, I can put them on the tape.

[59:20]When we got to Jacmel, we went and stopped at the Baruk's and they went with us or went in their car. Together, we went to the hotel and settled Violette and Rúhíyyih Khánum into their room. And they were fussing about pillows and how to get their mosquito net hung up on the wall and things like that. We were there a little while and then they came down. We were waiting downstairs, and asked us to have some drinks so we sat around the table there, the very pleasant little Jacmelian hotel, and had a few soft drinks. And then we repaired to Moro and Paule's house. I remember, as we gathered around the table, there was one chair too few. There were four chairs for five people, so Rúhíyyih Khánum went over to the next table, and with a very dramatic and vigorous gesture, she whisked one of these heavy iron chairs with a, with a, what do you call it? Not straw, but some kind of fiber weaving in it. She whisked this thing around so that it landed right in the right place around the table and was very pleased with herself. And then she sat down in another chair, and it wasn't quite the right shape so she replaced it with another one that was better slanted. She's quite a character, and she was very beautifully dressed in a bright red blouse, which matched her lipstick and made her stand out. She mentioned later, I think it was as I was driving them home. We had some supper, a little bit of homemade Joumou soup - I think that's pumpkin - and some homemade pita bread and homemade jams with different kinds of coconut and something else. A very nice supper, sitting around there. After that, I took them home and Rúhíyyih Khánum said something about how so often with the Baháʼís, she feels completely humbled, considering their services to the Faith before she had - I think it was just before that remark. I'm not sure, she’d said, how few pioneers would have chosen the location that the Baruks chose to live in Jacmel right in the middle of town. It was very poignant. She didn't really say anything more, but I had pictures of the kind of--

[1:01:51] This is the evening of the 27th of October 1982. Some recollections about the visit of Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette Nakhjavani to Haiti. This is the second tape. I was just describing a little bit of what was happening yesterday, the 26th. And then I'm going to work backwards to the afternoon of the 23rd, which is when I last recorded on these tapes. I was saying that I had this picture after Rúhíyyih Khánum had mentioned about the Baruks living in the middle of Jacmel. What most other pioneers would have done if they'd gone to Jacmel at all, they would have chosen an appropriate house somewhere on the outskirts of town or down by the sea and wouldn't have mixed so well with the, with the people. Moro had told a story about, or the two of them, I can't remember, about selling or buying a fish, how the merchant would come by and he would bargain the price way down from something exorbitant to less than a third. And everybody would remark, they'd all gather around and encourage the seller of the fish. And then they would on and on congratulate Moro on getting such a good price. And for several days after that, all the neighbors way up the street, when they came down by the house and saw them in passing or something, they'd say, "How was the fish? Was it good?" The story of the selling of the fish and the price that had been received would be communicated all up and down and around the neighborhood. And you have a very, very much feeling of a small town when you drive into Jacmel. It reminded me a little bit of just driving around the market. Some of the shops there, of the shops around the central square in Otavalo in Ecuador, same kind of a small, small town atmosphere. It's very pleasant, I must say. The church bell was ringing and it seemed very much like a South American town.

[1:03:54] There was very pleasant feelings, going there with Rúhíyyih Khánum. And I was thinking as we settled her into her room how if I'd gone by myself, I would have felt lonely. And if I'd gone to visit the Brooks, there would have been some problems that they would have wanted to share with me, and that would have been work [‘’laughs’’]. But when you go with Rúhíyyih Khánum, everybody wants to be positive with her even though Moro had been sick the day before or that morning - I guess the day before and that morning. And they undoubtedly had problems. He certainly wouldn't talk about them with Rúhíyyih Khánum. It's really a delight to travel with her. I'm sure they would come out, but the point is that everything is upbeat around her, partly it's a reflection of her own optimism and love and partly people's respect for her. And so that makes it very pleasant to be traveling with her. And as I was - well, I remember exactly when, she said something about how I need mothering and that I get too tired and need to have someone to tell me to get some rest and so forth. And I felt a little badly because I really did get very, very tired during this week that she was here and it wasn't her fault, certainly. It was a conjunction of a very heavy load of getting a monthly letter finished and other things out of the way with my job before she came so that I would be a little bit freed, and the inauguration and all the dreariness might have worked their way into that. I've really been stretched really thin, happy to have a couple days here to catch up a little bit.

[1:05:31] Anyway, she also mentioned on the-- I keep thinking of things on the trip over the mountain. We talked a little bit about mates or something. I don't remember how exactly, how the subject came up. My mind still isn't functioning very well, but she was talking about American women and she said, you know. It's one of her themes, but she was quite specific and talked at length about it, how American women have been exploiting American men. And if there's any place in the world that there should be women's lib movement, it would be in Saudi Arabia and certainly not in the U.S.. And she said that she had been invited after the Evanston conference, when she'd come back from Africa, she said, a large conference in Evanston, which I guess was the one that I attended, a youth conference. She had gone to Milwaukee or someplace to give a radio interview, and the young man had asked her what she thought about women's lib, and she said she'd never heard of it. She'd been in Africa traveling. She didn't know what it was. Oh, maybe it wasn't radio because she talks about a headline. It must've been a journalist. And he said, well, he explained a little bit about what it was and then he said, "What do you think of it?" She said, "Well, I think that there should be a men's lib movement in this country." That women take advantage of the men. And he asked if he could quote her and she said yes. So she said there was a big headline in the paper, something to the effect that she had been espousing men's lib. Anyway, she referred to an experience that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had that apparently He had mentioned often to the family when He returned to 'Akká, and the Guardian used to mention it, that there was a time, I guess, I don't know, they were in a park or something or other, and Mrs. Parsons [ph] had gotten some dust on her shoe. And she lifted up her foot with her shoe on it so that Mr. Parsons [ph] could kneel down and wipe the dust off with his handkerchief or something to that effect. I don't know if I have it exactly right, but that's the idea. And this was according to Rúhíyyih Khánum. It was absolutely too much for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. He couldn't get over that, and He often remarked about it, apparently. She used that as an example of her point.

[1:07:53] Well, working backwards, I dropped Violette off at the Currelly's yesterday morning so that she could try to find some tennis shoes because the Baruks had talked about fording's and rivers on foot in order to get to a village. They didn't find any tennis shoes for sale, but Deb loaned a couple pairs to the, our guests or the honored guests to use for their trip. And they needed some bread and some potable water to take with them, and I don't know what else. They got some of these refrigerate-able or freezable gel packets for the ice chest. Now, the night before, that was the 26th, okay. The evening with the 25th, they invited the Currellys after supper, and Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette went shopping in the morning. And I took some home afterwards. We had some lunch together at the [Olofsson?], and then we went home. I did a little bit more shopping. I'll go into that a little more. And the evening before that, that would have been the 24th, they invited for supper the Baruks. And the evening of the 23rd - my goodness, I don't remember anymore. I guess that must have just been a quiet supper. Let me see. The 23rd was Saturday. I may be misconstructing this. It should be obvious if - I should listen to this tape. Let's listen to it all the way through again, and, as I say, I'm still a little foggy. But Linda left to go up to Cap-Haïtien for the weekend and took René [ph] with her. And I think that that must have been Saturday evening when that we met with Joe, who came with the Currellys again. And we went over the itinerary of the trip and made a few final modifications and so forth and discussed the details. And then that evening ended fairly early because Rúhíyyih Khánum was still very tired from the very long planning meeting the evening before, if I'm not getting the dates mixed up. I'm not sure here. Anyway, that happened in there somewhere.

[1:10:25] Then on Sunday - it's amazing. I can't seem to fit it all together. It must have been Saturday that we went up to the mission because they're closed on Sundays. And then it must have been Sunday that we took a hike up the mountain in the afternoon, but I don't remember anymore what happened in the morning. Unless there was just some rest, but it seems that there was no long period of rest in there anywhere, despite Rúhíyyih Khánum's best efforts. We had a wonderful walk up the mountain. There was a period of a nap in the afternoon, and then they wanted to go for a little walk so I put on my hiking boots and they put on various and sundry, warm things. And we drove up to the end of the [old Montanoire?] and walked up, and I'd forgotten how rocky it was and the ground, although it hadn't rained that day, was still a little bit muddy and it was quite slippery. And I had just done the edge of my, well, on tinder hooks, as it were in case Rúhíyyih Khánum would fall and break something, and there'd be terrible problems resulting so I stayed just one step behind her the whole way. And in case she should fall, I might be able to grab something, but she took her steps very carefully and didn't twist anything or hurt anything. And we had quite a long walk and got back just at dusk. It was just getting dark enough to have trouble seeing clearly by the time we got back to our car and Khánum said that she started having a severe pain in her foot just as we were coming up the stairs to the house. It was very good timing from that point of view. She has some kind of a nerve that hurts. So does Violette, apparently, in the foot if she walks too much, but she liked it very much. That's what she said, anyway. And getting out and getting some exercise in the up and down, the very steep climb on the mountain, she said, was good for the muscles that she doesn't usually use. She does some exercises in the morning, but they apparently don't involve the knees and ankles, and so she appreciated that walk. But I was concerned that suggesting the steep part instead of a flatter part that she’d seen earlier on our way up and I suggested we might stop there, but we'd already gone by the turning, and I was apprehensive, lest that not turn out very well.

[1:12:59] I'm pretty sure that was that day because we had to rush to get back in time for the Baruks to come. And I was wanting to take a little quick shower after the walk. And the Baruks came just slightly early and Khánum and Violette were upstairs. And the pump had stopped working, the switch on the pump that was needing replacing but I couldn't find the part. So I had to go out and tap it to get the thing to start up again and jump in the shower and welcome the Baruks and all that all at once. [laughs] That was a very interesting evening. The Baruks managed to draw out of them a great many stories. And although Khánum said that they're very tiring, being that kind of people, both talkative and very intense, you know, and emotional, it was quite an instructive comparison between the evening with the Baruks and the following evening with the Currellys who were much more relaxed and relaxing people. And the subject matter wasn't nearly as varied or profound or as challenging with the Currellys as it was with the Baruks. We had a very pleasant dinner, and Rúhíyyih Khánum told a lot of stories, and I've made a few notes here to try to remember some of the priceless series of things. And let me just see if I can reconstruct that.

[1:14:31] This is going back a little bit. It was one of the meals - it must have been Sunday morning or Sunday noon, and the meal’s here before the Baruks came. I mentioned, I don't know what the context was with this fellow in East Africa who had left the Faith to become a minister of the government and then the Guardian had died and so on. I just knew the bare outlines of it. Well, it turned out that Violette knew this person very well and told, went into it by quite a length, and there's an article by him in Baháʼí World. I don't remember exactly what his name was. It's something like Ben Doozy [ph]. And she called him Dooz [ph] or something like that, but anyway, I can look that up in the Baháʼí world. Apparently, he was a good friend of theirs, but he was Malawian. I don't know where they got to know him. And he'd been a, apparently, a dedicated Baháʼí, and he had this offer to, I don't know the exact sequence of events, but anyway he became involved in politics. He was thrown into prison at some point with Banda, the president of Malawi, and so he had very good connections there and apparently had told Banda in prison, had often quoted Baháʼí quotations and mentioned various things relating to the Faith to him. And he had intended to become, he had been appointed the minister then of the government, or was about to be appointed the minister, I guess, of the new Banda government. And she says that she remembered seeing, I don't remember if it was she or Ali now. I'm sorry, it's kind of fuzzy, but during the funeral in London, she remembers seeing this black man off in the distance by himself under a tree or something, or Ali did, I guess. And going over, saw him and saw that it was this fellow and he had tears coming down his eyes and he was very, very sad. And he had corresponded, apparently with Ali, and said something about how sorry he was about losing the Guardian, and that he had intended to come back to the Faith to leave politics definitively and then within three weeks or something - no, no,I'm getting it mixed up. But anyway, he had been appointed the minister in Malawi and he was murdered. And she said that she had met another, I guess it was another Malawian just recently in the same town where Mrs. Efnon Shomeiz [ph], I guess, is her name. Efnon [ph] is pioneering in Canada and had mentioned this fellow, and the fellow was quite dubious that their famous national hero had been a Baháʼí. And so she went and got Baháʼí world and showed him the article that this fellow had written, and the fellow she was talking with was very much impressed. It was quite a, quite a story. I really regret now that I'm losing the details of it.

[1:17:58] Rúhíyyih Khánum also mentioned that they were three years and 10 months traveling in Africa, and in that time Violette went back to Haifa once and Ali came to visit them in Africa once. And she mentioned while we were with the Baruks, she said, "While we're all letting our hair down, let me tell you something I don't usually talk about." She said when they got back after that trip, she went to the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh and all of a sudden she had this vision, apparently, when she was at the threshold. It was very clear image of herself as a little ant approaching the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh with a little grain of sand in its mouth. That's the way she felt after all of those services in Africa. We're also talking about children, because the Baruks have been thinking of adopting a child, and one of them, Paule wanted a child and Moro wasn't sure. And then Moro wanted, now, was thinking he wants one, and Paule wasn't sure. And Rúhíyyih Khánum said that should not take it lightly. It's a major commitment, and it's affecting, going to affect their whole lives if they do something like that. Then we talked a little bit about the raising the children, and she said, "You know, I think children need to have limits." She said it's like animals, the natural instinct of animals. You see, for many animals, the mother will be very loving to the children, but when they do something wrong or out of step, whack, a paw comes round with claws bared, and the little baby knows very well that that's something that it shouldn't do. And she said that Faizi had done a disservice to the Baháʼís in mistranslating. She said the word in the original, whatever language it was, in which Faizi said that the word was raising a hand against the child, but Baháʼís should not do that. But Rúhíyyih Khánum says that the word in Persian, whatever it was, is really beating or thrashing. It's a much stronger word. That is what is prohibited, and she thinks there's nothing wrong with a little bit of firm discipline, apparently. She was also very interested in, I mentioned at the dinner table, about the quotation that she had shared with me in Haifa from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá about most of mankind being either deadly poison or worthless weeds. I said that I'd seen it in the selected writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. And she was most interested and reminded me after dinner to go and get it and show it to her and was very pleased.

[1:20:39] It was another time, I have a little note here. She was talking about the Guardian and I asked her where they had gone and - oh, I guess it must have been on this walk we took. Perhaps we were talking about walks and so forth. She said they went to Interlaken and then they took a funicular or a train, I guess, until as far as it went up into the mountains. And then there was a place where they could take a funicular even higher, and the Guardian took her up and showed her where he had climbed up the Jungfrau. She said it was not, she said it was not a dangerous but a vigorous climb. And she said that the first time he took her for a walk, she was sick for several days with a fever. She said that they had been in [Poirxion?] or something that a couple of times that were one mark a night, but more often ones that were in the range of 250, apparently humble sorts of places. And she said that when she was sick after this walk, the Guardian had come in and asked her if she couldn't walk. And she said no, she wasn't accustomed to it. She was an American and never walked. And he had a look of disgust on his face, as much as to say, "What did I marry?" and walked out? He wasn't very sympathetic. But there was another time when we were talking about cockroaches because she came down the stairs, put her hand on a cockroach that was on the banister and let out the most horrendous shriek. And Violette and I were sitting downstairs waiting for her and both checked up in alarm. And I think it was after that, we were talking about insects and whatnot. And she said that she never called upon the Guardian as a husband because he was the Guardian of the Faith. To her, he was the Guardian of the Baháʼí Faith, although she inserted that, of course they were a happy, happily married couple. She didn't mean in that sense. But in the ordinary way of asking the husband's due things, she didn't call on him except for one thing, and that was in relation to cockroaches. [‘’laughs’’] She said she never liked them and he would be very gallant when there was one and would go over promptly and step on it, kill it for her. She smiled cutely about that. She was very pleased.

[1:23:00] She also told us the story when the Baruks were here about - oh because they were, oh that's right. We were asking, we were telling her stories that we had heard and asking her if they were accurate. And the Baruks asked her about the story that circulates a great deal about her having something with wine sauce and the way they had heard it, the Guardian had said not to mention it, to forget about it and go ahead and eat it, you see. And she said, "No, no, that was exactly the opposite." And then she said that the story was, was that they went into a restaurant in Switzerland, I think. And there were two choices for the plat du jour, and she ordered a “lap-a-ala” something or other, some name, and it was very good in a thick brown sauce. And she ate it with relish. And at the end, apparently she asked the waiter what it was made with because it tasted so good, and he said it was made with a red wine. There was a red wine sauce, and the Guardian got very upset, firm and whatever end said that she must never do that again. And she explained that, "But Guardian I'd never, I've been a Baháʼí my life, I've never tasted wine. I didn't know that there was wine in there. I wouldn't even know what it tasted like if it was there." And he insisted, apparently several times, "Promise me that you will never do that again." She said. That was that story. Now I'm sure there were others, but I don't remember now what it was. I guess they'll come back to me.

[1:24:38] The next day, the 26th - no, no, no. Wait a minute. Now, the next day, it was the 25th. That was Monday. I went to work, and I just don't remember what all transpired in there. My goodness, let me pause for a minute and think about it. Ah, okay, I think this works out here. That was the morning that the-- yes, I took them down, and I left them at the travel agency where the wife of the Real Alond [ph], Danielle Alond [ph] works. She had already left, but she'd taken their ticket to try to see what she could do with it. And they went in there, and I left them and went ahead to my office and sent the car back with Oragean [ph]. And later I discovered that they got nowhere with the travel agent. And then they went with him to the Iron Market and did some more shopping there. And they showed up at my office around 12:30 or so, and Rúhíyyih Khánum was just beaming. She was just absolutely pleased, ear to ear. Just tickled pink with herself, and partly because of the things she had found, I think. She had found a lovely sculpture which she'd gotten for I think, $13 or something down from 30, an unusual sculpture for Haitian work that I've seen that made out of a light colored wood with a dark coloring in the cracks and crevices and a light on the surface and it's a Madonna and child and the three Kings around and the sheep and so forth and Joseph there. And she's very pleased with it. It has a very nice feeling about it. It's obviously a copy of a medieval work, but the Mary looks distinctly African, not so much the nose but the lips and so forth. And she's saying that the sculpture obviously was very, very good with his tools, and when he got to Mary, his resolve broke down. He couldn't make her as obviously Caucasian as he'd made everybody else in the piece, and she liked that. And she liked the self-satisfied expression on the baby. And they'd gotten some other bowls and interesting things. They stopped and got some at the Pharmacie Séjourné. They got some three bottles of "citronel" oil, which is good against mosquitoes.

[1:27:34] And so I took them to the Olofsson, and they liked it very much. Rúhíyyih Khánum kept talking about how nice it was to get about at the city and to that castle, she called it. And we had the pork, what is it? The barbecue lunch. And they were astonished that it was a three-course meal and kept talking about how much weight they'd been putting on, and I feel terribly guilty. I should make an aside about that. You know, it's been very difficult figuring out what to do with these guests because Rúhíyyih Khánum is most unusual. She's very concerned and when she was leaving here, said that she'd put on four kilos so far on this trip, and I think the figure was two when she arrived. They carry a scale with them, so they must have put on two kilos each, apparently, during their week with me, and partly because of the bountiful cooking of Leon [ph]. But it's very hard to do anything because she obviously likes to eat and she seems to think that a light meal is steak and potatoes and vegetable and a salad. That's what she asked for lunch yesterday. That was a waste and she wanted me to give instructions to Duasolo [ph] who was here cooking. And she complains about having soups, which most people think are light, and she doesn't like fruits very much. She said that she had been raised in Montreal where the fruits were only occasional and in season, and she never grew to like them very much. And she'd had the night before last - some watermelon was served at dessert the evening the Currellys came. She only ate half of it, and she said that it gave her terrible tummy ache later.

[1:29:20] So, you know, most people think of salad and fruit as being a light meal, but she'd had indigestion the night before. I was trying to reduce the amount of food, and so the two evenings before, we had what I thought was a light meal, which was just some toast there, brown bread toasted and cheese and mamba and honey and a little bit of salad and things like that to put together. And the first of those two dinners, we had the green - let's see, that would've been Sunday night. I'm getting hopelessly confused about what happened when, but anyway, we had these three green vegetables, funny things that are soft inside that Leon makes with a sort of a mixture of cheese as a dressing. We had those because they'd already been made, and the other things were put aside. Anyway, I was trying to produce a light dinner, you see, and that apparently wasn't the sort of thing that Rúhíyyih Khánum likes. But she also doesn't like eating too much, and I don't really know what to do to make it work out all right. And she seems to be very reticent to be too specific about what she wants. She feels that it's appropriate for me to take her instructions to servants, and so she should give instructions to me. And then she says, she's so indirect and very discreet and noble, you know, about the way she says things very often. She was saying something yesterday about how, to the Baruks, I think, how hard it is when you're traveling because you have to be polite, you know. When people go out of their way to make something and you don't want to hurt their feelings, and so you feel obliged to eat it. And I had a little bit of a feeling that she was saying that partly to me, too, you know? But it's hard to tell.

[1:31:21] There was another time during these last few days when she said something in passing about how I needed to be - oh, yes, it was because I was chauffeuring them around to all these shoppings and everything, how it was good for me to get a little bit out of my bachelor ways, something in passing like that. Anyway, that was all a parenthesis. We were at the Olofsson for lunch, and then afterwards, she wanted to look for these tennis shoes. I went back to my office and we asked the secretary where tennis shoes might be found. And she gave a description of a couple of places within a couple of blocks, so they set off by foot. And they were back within half an hour or 45 minutes saying that the places were extraordinary. They're supposed to have tennis shoes. There was absolutely nothing that was interesting, and that was that. And so I got my things and we headed up towards the house. And then she said if it was on the way, she wanted to stop at Ambiance, that very fancy little store that was near the hotel Le Splendid where she'd stayed before. And so I drove over there and we had a very pleasant time at Ambiance looking at all the elegant but much overpriced things. And then on the way out, we started talking to a young man who is the son of one of the ladies who's running the store, and she took quite a fancy to him. He had some very good ideas but very outspoken and forward young man, but she liked him very much. And as we were leaving, we gave him some little literatures and things and exchanged cards, and she made a point several times since then of saying that it's important that somebody make a contact with them, that she liked him and would like to see him cultivate a little bit, that maybe he would be interested in the Faith. And she said it's important that we go out and meet people and make contacts like that.

[1:33:27] Then we came up to the house and had a little rest and a pleasant dinner. And the Currellys came after dinner. Well, they came at dessert time. They had a little bit of this melon, and we just had a sort of relaxed evening talking not too late. Rúhíyyih Khánum talked a little bit about the design of the house, of the seat of the House of Justice and how there were some mistakes made that wouldn't have been made if the architect had to consult with a woman and how it was important that she thinks that it should be a law that architects have to consult with a woman before they finish their designs. And she mentioned the light-colored wall-to-wall carpeting in the cafeteria and the fact that there's one door and there should be two, one in and then out, which she's expressed herself on that subject to Hossein Amanat but he didn't listen to her. He said it would be all right. And she described how big the building was and one thing or another, I don't remember what else we talked about. We had talked earlier, I think, about the system at the World Center. I was very interested in this, one of the times we were just sitting around in the living room, which was quite frequent. And they described to me, the two of them, that all the staff, apparently, at the World Center, it sounded like it was the same treatment for everybody, but I'm not exactly sure. They all get housing, which is provided by the House of Justice, appropriate to their needs. And they have a buyer who does all the buying for the whole World Center. I guess it's one person, I don't know.

[1:35:06] And they have some kind of a storehouse, and one is free to go and take what everyone needs. And as recently they've implemented a system where you sign a chit and chits get turned in to the Department of Finance, and they keep track of how much value each person is using, but there's no limit to it. And then they get an allowance, which comes to apparently around $20 a month, this figure that they quoted, which is enough for going to a couple of movies a week or something like that. It's entire pocket money, and people can buy something nice in the way of new clothes every two years, and that kind of thing. And they get a home leave every two years, which includes something like $15 a day for lodging and the air ticket. And that's it, period. If you want to do anything else, if you want a car, or nicer furnishings or anything of that kind, it has to be your own funds. This is a strictly volunteer administration. And Khánum mentioned that already they've had a 30% increase in staff this past year. I'm not exactly sure what definition of year, but anyway, they've had this large increase in anticipation of moving into the seat of the House of Justice. We needed to increase the staff. And it was to the point where they used to know everybody, they no longer recognize everybody. Even though the House of Justice introduces everyone as they arrive, they can't keep track any longer because there've been so many. There was one case they mentioned where somebody walked up to Ali and said, asked him what department he worked in. So things apparently are very, changing very rapidly there. It’s becoming quite a different kind of community. And we talked about pensions and so on. She said no, there's absolutely nothing like that. The fund couldn't afford it and that some years ago, when the Hands were running the Faith as, I think, if I remember correctly that's when it was, someone, I guess, in the U.S. has proposed a pension for pioneers. And the Hands had intervened very rapidly and cut that off, said that wasn't appropriate and not possible for the funds. So the idea is that people leave early enough to get some other kind of income or they have some Social Security or something or other, and that otherwise it should be for young people who stay a limited period of time or for older people who have some some kind of way of supporting themselves as they get too old to work. And most people leave voluntarily when they start feeling that they are limited usefulness or that they need to get in a couple of more years to get their social security in their home country or whatever it is. It's really astonishing that they can man the whole World Center that way.

[1:37:58] They've recently hired a new personnel manager, somebody with experience in this field to help them because it's really a problem when you get so many new people, getting them all organized and broken in and understanding the circumstances. They mentioned the 36, I think, people they have now for security alone, which has mostly been very recently, including this Fijian policeman who's apparently very big. And they talked a little bit on the way to Jacmel yesterday about this immersion fellow who has been running the post for so long, he now has a little tiny car of some kind and he goes twice down to the post office to get the mail and deliver the cables and so forth. They talked about the problems of security and that they had a couple people who were doing janitorial work and cleaning up, and to their astonishment, they discovered from things that these people had said to the other friends that they were reading the telexes off the machine that came through overnight. So they had to lock up the telex machine and take more care with the security arrangements. Apparently Berun or whatever his name is, the immersion has brought a whole lot of family, and they rattled off all kinds of brothers and sisters. I don't know at all who are working in the cleaning and janitorial field. They never had janitors before. They never had security and they never had people devoted particularly to janitorial services, but the new building is so big, they needed a serious staff for these things.

[1:39:37] Khánum is very much into health, and we talked about that a little bit a couple of days ago. They like brown things: brown bread and brown, unpolished rice and brown sugar. Rúhíyyih Khánum was very much set on brown sugar and molasses and things like that. She thinks it's very good for you. We bought a long sugar cane and had it all chopped up and she ate almost the whole thing. Chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp. Just seems to thrive on that and thinks it's very good for you. I don't know where she gets that idea. And she's going to Georgia after this trip for a three-week stay, apparently with a Baháʼí physician there who has a clinic and gives cures. She said that's a place that they used to go in Germany. It's now prohibitively expensive, and they're hoping this man will work out. He does tests for trace elements and things like that while you're there and charges only $150 a week, apparently, or something like that, which seems very reasonable. And I think it was, maybe it was when the Currellys were here, we were talking about that and they said, "How can they do that and feed you, too?" And she said, "Oh, they don't feed you. They starve you." So it's really just the logic. Anyway, she's very much interested in that and homeopathy, which, of course, the Guardian was impressed with. She carries with her a big kit of all kinds of homeopathic remedies, just in case she needs it.

[1:41:11] And I went into their room to get something with their permission one afternoon, and I saw this enormous array of bottles of all kinds of pills and things on the counter in the bathroom. And she always had a big handful of pills, maybe a dozen or so at the table during meals. And she had these little Chinese pills and brown pills and something else she was taking, something like five or six of those every meal for a certain period of time, not a permanent thing, somebody's remedy that she'd gotten. And she mentioned on the 24th a little note here that the Guardian had said several times that suffering destroys the memory. And she said that the Guardian mentioned that that he had felt that he was losing his memory, although she felt that from what she could see, he was still the most astute person that she knew and certainly the most brilliant or smartest or something she said, but apparently he had noticed a deterioration. Well, I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of things, but I have to go to a morning to see the Master Israel [ph]. I'm going to give him a present of this new book about the Holy Land and the Faith there, A Crown of Beauty. And a full day of appointments and things, and I'm really tired out, so I better get some rest and whatever I remember later, I can try to add to this tape. So this is the evening again of the 27th of October 1982 discussing the events around the visit of Rúhíyyih Khánum through yesterday, the 26th.

[1:43:12] This is now the next morning, the morning of the 28th and some of the fog has cleared, and I'm beginning to remember what happened. It was Saturday morning that we drove up to Kenscoff, which I'd already I think described on the tape. We had a very pleasant lunch there. And then it was Sunday morning that we had the, I took them down to the National Assembly meeting, which was, I think, at 10:00 at the Baháʼí Center. And there were lots of people milling around for the ordinary meetings, the adult meeting downstairs and the children's class up on the porch. And I felt really full of all kinds of things that time so I took off and didn't know exactly where to go. I didn't even have the keys to my office, and I had a pile of newspapers and things I wanted to catch up on, so I drove over to the park near the museum and parked in the shade and - no, first I stopped and went through the museum, which I was very impressed with, the Haitian collection there. Small, but it was very, very fine, and some nice humor. I was in the mood to enjoy things like that. And then I drove around the other side and parked under a tree and just sat for about an hour and read the newspapers and had a quiet moment, then went back to the center around 11:30. Rúhíyyih Khánum had asked me to come at 12:00 in case, about the time that she would be finished, but I want to be there a little early in case they finished early. But the meeting went until, I guess, 12:30 and I stood around. I sat there for a while and just read the American Baháʼís.

[1:44:53] And then Josh, whatever his name is, the musician with the Magnum band came out and we talked for a while and I talked with some of the other Baháʼís for a while. And then members of the National Assembly all started appearing here and there. And eventually I got a message from Moro that they wanted me to come up and take the official picture with Rúhíyyih Khánum. And unfortunately, it was just at that moment, they wanted me, and I was caught off guard. And they wanted to take the picture in the meeting room, which was not as much light as I was expecting. I brought my camera, but I had the Kodachrome in there for an outdoor picture, and I didn't quite have enough time to change the film to a faster film. So I took my picture as thoroughly as-- and I don't know if they're going to come out. It's a shame. And then several other cameras were there and we were clicking pictures away, whole set without Violette and then another set with her. That took a little while and Khánum tried to smile sweetly through the whole thing. And then we left, a few goodbyes and all that sort of thing. And there was nothing to do at that point so we drove back up to the house and Leon had already made some chicken. But Khánum didn't want anything that heavy so they kept that for the evening meal with the Baruks, and we just had the, she'd already made the green vegetable that I was referring to. I don't remember what it's called. Here it’s called “militon”, which was hot with cheese on it. But otherwise we had salad and all those things that I was describing for lunch. And then there must have been a rest after lunch.

[1:46:40] And we went on this hike around 3:30 or 4:00. And I think I had another very sound sleep. I was getting very tired, so I took these little naps in the afternoon. Pretty, pretty sound. One of the themes that Khánum has been coming back to the last few days, and that she talked about quite some length when the Currellys were here was the fact that the world is overpopulated. She keeps saying that there are just too many people, and that's one of the main problems. Whenever we talk about problems, she said, "Well, I think it's just that there are too many people." And she says she doesn't understand how people can have lots of children. That makes more sense to her that people in this time when they know that the world has a problem with too many people would limit the number of children that they have. But at one point, as an aside, she said that wasn't the reason why she and the Guardian didn't have children. And she referred in rather strong terms, I think it was when the Currellys were here, to the passages in the Bible that indicate that the population will be cut by two-thirds or four-fifths or something of that nature. I also forgot to mention that some time when she was talking about the trips that she took with the Guardian to Switzerland, she said that her habit for walking was to walk very fast and then stop and take a rest. In spurts, she called it. And the Guardian said, no, no other way to do it is to have a mountaineer step, a little slower but steady. And she said that if she had married the Guardian when he was younger, that he would have killed her because by the time that they were married, he was not, like, as vigorous, as vigorous as he had been in his youth and slowed down for a while. And she could keep up with him, but she was so sure that she couldn't have when he had been younger.

[1:48:33] This is continuing on the morning of the 28th of October 1982, some recollections of Rúhíyyih Khánum's visit to Haiti. One of the recent mornings, I guess maybe it was a couple of days ago at breakfast, I raised somehow the subject of Doug Ruhe buying, for being one of the owners of UPI and Rúhíyyih Khánum wasn't aware of that. She knew that he'd been involved in TV development, and she said that this had been very hard on his wife, Bev [ph], and the family and that Meg [ph] was very worried about it. And I think she said that Meg [ph] had had some kind of a breakdown, but I didn't catch that, and I didn't want to probe it. Anyway, it seems that Meg [ph] was worrying a lot about the children. She had said earlier on that when we were talking about Paule and Bahiyyih's divorce, that it had been harder, she thought, on Violette than it had been on Bahiyyih. Violette worries a great deal about her children. It's a natural thing, I suppose, for mothers to do. Anyway, we were talking about Doug and I described to her what he got into with UPI and problems he was facing and the publicity and so on. And she absorbed all that, and a little while later, she said, "You know, I just don't understand how young Baháʼís can go into projects of this kind. She referred to the many times that the Guardian had warned the pilgrims of tremendous problems facing them. She said that, who was it? One of the well-known Western Baháʼís had come on pilgrimage and he had said some very strong things to her, but then asked her not to share them with the friends, the pilgrims notes, because he said it would only alarm them and it wouldn't do any good.

[1:50:33] But Rúhíyyih Khánum quoted one time when he said, "Even if they don't leave the centers of materialism in the West for pioneering, let them leave to save their own skins." Quote, unquote. And she said he was very, very vehement on the subject, and she was wondering what he would say now if he were still alive, implying that it would be even stronger, what his warnings would be now. And she said with that kind of a view, how can people enter a field that is clearly involved with high technology and high finance and all of that? And that doesn't have necessarily an immediate usefulness for the Faith. It's too big, she said, to be used for the Faith. She said she could understand my small business because it puts things in people's hands and has an immediate, as she put it, has an immediate result. And so, at any time, extrapolating from what she said, that is any time that there is a sudden problem, at least you will accomplish something whereas the Baháʼís who like those in Iran who were in business risk losing everything and not getting it out. And she talked, I think, I don't remember, don't remember if it was at that point or somewhere else, she talked about knowing that how losing everything and how they had, someone in Switzerland had said that they should take the money out of Iran and deposit it in Switzerland. This was earlier, and they didn't. They kept it in Iran, and she mentioned some other people who had kept their money in Iran because of the high interest rates, 20% or something was being offered. And another lady whose son had gotten her money out, and she said that she couldn't understand because the deposit rates were higher in Iran. After the collapse in Iran, the lady still didn't grasp that she could have lost everything. It's very, very interesting.

[1:52:30] Khánum came off rather strong, and it's not very long, but she was talking very strongly about how the Baháʼís must keep in mind the grave dangers. And she said it wasn't anything peculiar to the Guardian as the Guardian of the Baháʼí Faith that he should understand this, but that many commentators and intelligent people understood the danger involved in the highly materialistic and industrialized countries. And she said something like what the Currellys are doing here, she didn't really understand. Well, she did a little bit because it would help the country, but they had mentioned that one of their raw materials comes from Canada. And she said it's that kind of trade that will suffer first when there's any kind of disruption in the world. Certainly something well worth thinking about. She did mention that for Doug, she said that she could understand if he was trying to make a lot of money quickly, that she could see the point in that. And again, extrapolating that, you know, if you could make money quickly enough to give some to the Faith that that is worth perhaps the risk, the high risk involved. But in general, she's dubious of that kind of thinking, which, of course, is true of many, many of the Baháʼís in the richer countries. Well, that's what I can think of for now. And this is again the morning of the 28th of October. Recollections of Khánum's remarks and so forth through the 26th.

[1:53:57] This is now the evening of October 28th and I've thought of a couple more things that Rúhíyyih Khánum said in the last few days. When was that? We were discussing the boards of counselors and she said, "Well, you know, the South American board is excellent." They're very pleased with them. The Central American, she said, is not all, not up to the same quality, and she - I don't remember exactly how she put it. And she said, you know, we take what we can get. And then she said the Guardian had to take what he could get when he appointed the Hands of the Cause. He said that they weren't necessarily all that wonderful, but that's what he could get, what he could find and that he’d said something to that effect. Another thing she said, if we were talking about the state of the black community in Haiti and some of the past problems and the theft of Baháʼí funds and Julie Posey [ph] having countersigned checks and various and sundry things. And she said, well, you know, - I think she said--. I don't remember now, she said, the Guardian used to say, or whether it was her own observation, that Shoghi Effendi-- that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was extremely suspicious. Oh, I think, she said, that the Guardian was suspicious, but not nearly as suspicious as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. That's what it was. Clearly there, she said, that she was saying that there was nothing wrong with being suspicious, that in fact it's very important if you're going to protect the Faith.

[1:55:41] This is now in the evening of November the 2nd, and I'm going to have to try to begin to cover the last few days. And I probably won't have a chance to finish before I get too tired and need to go to bed. I'm also tumbling through a whole mixture of things because we've had a very, very intense last few days. And I got back, and it's quite a shock to get back into the big city after being out in the countryside in very pleasant circumstances and very rewarding teaching activities the last few days. Indeed, very historic occasions, and all of a sudden there are petty little problems with the pioneers and phone ringing and one thing or another. And a few minutes ago, I got a call from Don Davis to say that he had decided rather abruptly with his wife to go pioneering to Tonga within two months and leaves me completely up in the air with regard to my business and a whole another set of problems to worry about. I'm trying very hard to finish up things and have a fruitful and productive last few months here in Haiti, try to finish my dissertation and this article that I have to write for the Association for Baháʼí Studies and other loose ends like that, and the last thing I need is another major problem, so trying to trust in God and see how that works out. Anyway, if I can try to forget about that and go over my very sketchy notes here of the last few days. It's been a very rich experience.

[1:57:16] On Friday, I had agreed to go to Jacmel in order to pick up Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette Nakhjavani on Saturday morning and take them on the next leg of their journey. And I had not been able to reach René Jean-Baptiste for the last couple of days, auxiliary board member who had been pioneer in Central African Republic, and he's hard to reach. He has a phone at the photo shop where he works, but every time I called, most of the day on Thursday and Friday, he wasn't there, and I began to worry that for some reason he wasn't able to come or something although I'd heard from Linda that he knew that he was going to be going with me Friday. And I have no idea of what his schedule was. It wasn't until about 6:00, I think on Friday evening that I finally got through to him. And I knew that Khánum was expecting us there for a meeting on Friday evening. It turned out to be very unfortunate. We didn't get there earlier because they had a number of local dignitaries, the mayor and head of customs and some other people in Jacmel who had come to this meeting. And Rúhíyyih Khánum was very sorry that we hadn't gotten there earlier so that I would have had a chance to meet them. And also she said that she'd been worried about us. It's hard to phone. You have to go through an operator and wait some period of time so I didn't call ahead, not knowing yet, not having heard from René, not knowing what I was doing.

[1:58:41] So it turned out that he'd been up all night correcting tests or something. He's a school teacher, as well as working in this photo studio. And he was delayed in being able to get away, but that's the way that worked out. So we arrived there, oh, what must have been about 10:00, I guess, after driving over the mountains and moonlight, and some of the mountains were in fog and it was really rather extraordinary evening, driving through. We put on the, after talking for a while, put on the tape that Jacqueline's made for children in Canada and had our little cocoon or bubble of stereo sound going over the almost empty mountains. Didn't pass any moving vehicles, I don't think, in the whole trip over the mountains, a couple of trucks being repaired by the side of the road by candlelight. And we arrived and there was still a Belgian couple who work on boats and their daughter, and a couple of Haitians left of this meeting, but everybody else had gone home, that meeting in the Baruks home, and of course, Khánum and Violette. And we had some words and so forth. René stayed and ate some soup because he hadn’t had any dinner. And finally Khánum got tired of waiting for him, and the Baruks took them back to their hotel. And we went over a little bit later, slept soundly until the next morning. We had decided that we needed to leave by 9:30 and so we didn't have a great rush getting up in the morning. Beautiful, beautiful place, and very warm associations for me, the Jacmelian because I was staying there with Rúhíyyih Khánum the first time and with my mother the second time. That was very pleasant. René is a lovely, lovely person to be with, and I invited him to stay with me in the room. We had a very nice start to this branch of the journey.

[2:00:40] Then on the way over the mountains, I know I'm going to forget a lot here because this has been many, many hours with Khánum, and I haven't been able to remember all the things that she said. And later on, I'll probably think of things to add, as I had before. Going over the mountains from Jacmel, after we said goodbye to the Baruks and got some gas and our provisions altogether and so forth, Khánum was talking about her family and her family history. And I asked her a little bit about it and was prompting her. She said that her father had taken many years to become a Baháʼí, that they had gone on pilgrimage in 1909, she said and apparently - now, there was a 1902 in there too. I don't remember what that was. Hmm. Oh, I think that may have been when they met her when they got married. He was of Scotch background, but had been several generations living in Canada and went to Paris to study architecture and art, I guess, and was in the same - I guess, he must have been at this [Hukban?], I'm not sure. And I think that May's brother was there, and that's how Sutherland Maxwell met May Bolles and fell for her. And her mother warned him that she was of bad health and that he would have to put up with, perhaps with an invalid. And he said he didn't mind, and she told him that, May did, that the Faith would come first for her and he would have to understand that he would be second always for her, and he agreed to that. He was really very much taken with her. So they, after sometime, I guess they got married and went back to Canada.

[2:02:40] In 1909, they went on pilgrimage, and Khánum said that her father had said to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that he believed that God was everywhere. I don't know if that was in response to a question or what, from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. But he said that God was everywhere and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said that everywhere meant nowhere and that it was better to worship a stone because the stone was made by God. And apparently that was some kind of a turning point for her father, although he didn't become a Baháʼí right away. And then later, she didn't say exactly when, her mother, her father had said to her mother that he felt they were drifting apart, that he was spending more time in his club and she was spending all his time with Baháʼí activities and he was concerned. And this was something of a shock for her, and she was concerned that she might lose him, but she said she put her foot down essentially. She said that the Faith was first and that she hoped that he would come with her. And sometime after that, apparently Khánum said that she thought that was very important because if she had buckled into him, then she might not have been able to continue her services. And the Faith really was first for her, and so he decided to follow her and became a Baháʼí at some point after that. It's very interesting. She's mentioned her father frequently on this trip in many contexts. I don't know if it was because we got started on the subject or what exactly.

[2:04:10] And I mentioned to her again that her mother had encouraged my mother and had mentioned that Sutherland was four years younger than she, and that had helped my mother to decide to marry my father and so on. And she seemed very pleased about that. She also mentioned at that time that she was very surprised that her father, that the Guardian characterized her father in writing as saintly and her mother as a hero. And she said she never would have thought of her father as saintly, that when he was asked even after they moved to the Holy Land, when he was asked about religion, he said he wasn't a religious man [‘’laughs’’]. And then the Guardian had called him saintly. And I think she may be or someone had said to him that maybe he better not say that he wasn't religious because after all, the Guardian had said he was saintly. That wasn't really the right thing to say, but he certainly never considered himself as religious. She said that her father was a collector, whereas her mother was very detached and hardly had a hairbrush. And she talked quite a bit about what a good wife her mother was, how she would get out of bed. She mentioned this before, sometime quite a long time before, that her mother would get out of bed even when she was not well to fix dinner for her father and then get into bed. But she felt that was very important.

[2:05:26] And then she said on this time over the mountains from Jacmel that sometimes when her father was not well or was resting, I suppose, or something, her mother would come and sit on his bed, and he would explain to her at great length something that he was interested in, some book he was reading or something about art or architecture. And she would listen with great attention, even though she wasn't really interested in those subjects at all. And if she had been asked to characterize her mother, she would have said that her mother was saintly and not her father. She said that her father was an artist through and through, that he had very wide interests and would have been a Michelangelo type if he had been born earlier, very capable and a man of good judgment. She said that the Guardian appreciated him because he had sound judgment. And she put in parentheses not necessarily in financial matters but in other kinds of things. I asked her about the International Council and what its role was, what kind of problems the Guardian gave it, and she said that it was essentially powerless. It was a first step, and it was used by the Guardian in his relations with the state of Israel and the authorities. And I suppose, also, I say, I inferred from what she said as a stepping stone psychologically for the Baháʼí community, too, towards the House of Justice, but they didn't have any independent powers that didn't answer any correspondence of significance and never did anything independent of the Guardian's instructions.

[2:06:56] We had quite a long talk the next leg of the journey, about justice and the court system and Khánum had the interesting point that she didn't like the idea of the criminals having to somehow work off the damage they had done to the whoever it was that they might have perpetrated their crime against because she feels that she wouldn't like to receive anything from somebody who perpetrated a crime against her. Interesting point. Before we got on to that subject, we had two stops on this journey. One was in a village called [Charliea?], which is maybe half an hour beyond Miragoâne, where the Reynolds aluminum plant was, and we bounced along this little road to get to this place. And René where it was, and there was a little village with a graveyard, and then a series of houses on each side of the road. And in one of these houses, we had this Baháʼí meeting, and they were all people, all waiting for us and were very, very warm and receptive. And it was there that Khánum used her analogy of the lamp, Faizi’s story of the wonder lamp, which she said that she thought was Bill Sears' story. And we talked about it a little bit, three of us, and they weren't sure who, whether Faizi had gotten it from Sears or the other way around. They thought that probably it was Sears' idea originally. She had this little package of beautiful, different colored handkerchiefs, about eight of them. And she all folded up and she got them out and draped them all over the lamp, kerosene lamp, that lady had in the house and explained the story of how everybody comes and tries to embroider or adorn the lamp and eventually put the light out. Now the new manifestation has to come and release the light again. And the people in that village seemed to like that very much.

[2:09:05] We were there maybe an hour and a half and because we've been running late, we'd seen George Marcellus who had been supposed to left early to organize the meetings. And he came up behind us on the road going to this place, so we thought maybe best to leave some time for him to organize the meetings. And it turned out we left too much time, but we stopped and looked at some sculptures by the road. And then we had, we stopped again after going through Miragoâne, we stopped at Miragoâne, went down to the water's edge and looked at all the shellfish and the fish coming in in the dugout canoes. And Khánum took a picture of the church and we stopped and had some Seven Ups. And then afterwards we stopped by the road and got out all our mamba and bread and cucumbers and things and had a very nice picnic by the side of the road. And so we got there rather much later than the 12:30 that had been scheduled, and the people had been patiently waiting, apparently, for us. Then we had to go on to the next place before it got dark. We got there, I suppose, about 4:00 and it was supposed to be about 2:30, I think, and the people had been patiently waiting there. This was a place where we had to go through the river and I had to leave my car, and George took us in the jeep through the river and the village of Orouk, it's just on the other side. And he went up and sat under a tree between a couple of houses and had a very nice meeting again in that place, people listening very intently to what Khánum had to say and René translating. And I had pictures, I took pictures in that place. We didn't remember to take them unfortunately in [Charliea?].

[2:10:38] Very, very warm teaching experiences. All of these people are most hospitable and interested in the Faith and very, very receptive and courteous and very, very warm, nice feelings. It's very hard to explain on the tape, but it warms one's heart, you know, to have this kind of teaching experience. Then we drove on and got into Les Cayes considerably after dark. It's extremely dingy and depressing hotel called the Concord, where we had a miserable dry chicken and rice dinner, and we're not very impressed at all with the prospects of this place. Khánum's room was one of the best rooms in the place, with the window and a large double bed for her and a smaller bed on the side for Violette. I had a little tiny room with one of these 12-inch long fluorescent bulbs. It's barely illuminating it, and dingy was Rúhíyyih Khánum's word, and a little dirty in the corners, mosquitoes and one thing or another. It wasn't as bad as we had prepared ourselves for. The mosquitoes weren't awful. And they had fans, at least in the rooms and these old [vatmap?] things and the combination of a fan and [vatmap?], some repellent did pretty well and I didn't actually get any bites while sleeping, which was a blessing. We saw Joe Coblentz who'd gone by truck ahead of time to prepare meetings. And this was all on Saturday, all of this took place. Well, maybe I didn't mention, the 29th of - no, the 30th of October. And Michael Bannister, who’s a forester working with an AID financed project living in the middle of Cayes.

[2:12:38] The next day was Sunday. Over breakfast, I think - I’m trying to figure out my notes here. Must have been in the morning we were talking, I don't remember what subject, and Khánum mentioned that among the first pilgrims after the war was Owen Patrick [ph] who had been a some kind of tank officer, had his own tank under Montgomery, I think, British forces. And somebody named Martin who had been a similar officer in the tank, apparently, if I'm not mistaken, under Ramel [ph] came about three weeks after, and she said it was really astonishing to see these people who'd fought each other in the war all within the Faith. And Martin had said that it was unsupportable to him that the Germans had lost the war. And then when he became a Baháʼí, he completely changed and felt relieved that that was the way the war had turned out. Now Patrick went pioneering, of course, in the South Pacific and Martin went pioneering somewhere in Africa. And she’d commented on how meaningful that was. We had a meeting at Michael Bannister’s, and we'd been up a little earlier. It was scheduled for 11:00. And so we took a little drive around to see the town and stopped at the market. Khánum was most interested in the market, and we were looking for bananas. We didn't find any ripe ones, but we looked at everything else with great care. Quite an interesting place. And then we went to Michael's about 11:30. We passed him on the road and they suggested that we didn't need to be there quite at 11:00. And the place had been done up absolutely beautifully. This young man who lives nearby apparently is an artist, and he had made a lovely heart-shaped design with palm fronds and flowers on the wall. And there were signs welcoming Rúhíyyih Khánum and letters on the wall. I took pictures of all of that.

[2:14:48] About 25 people there, and they listened very attentively, all dressed very nicely. One family with two kids, a little girl of nine, I think, said a prayer in a very solid voice. And Khánum commented on how good it is that children learned to say prayers forcefully enough that people can hear them, that many kids mumble into their prayer book and can't be heard. Then after that meeting, we had lunch at Michael's, and that was a marvelous occasion. It was such a contrast from the dingy hotel. His house is clean and neat, everything in the right place and painted white and sunshiny and open and nice, neat yard. And he was apologetic the day before. He wasn't sure whether we would, well, he didn't really invite us because he said there'd be chaos in the house as a result of the meeting and everything, but it turned out to be most welcome and Violette helped. We had some canned soup and Americans [who piece shops?] at the commissary and some American apple orange juice, and some things that - I can't remember if we have things that we had brought. Anyway - oh we had some cheese and we had a wonderful cream cheese with garlic in it or something like that. Anyway, it was very, very pleasant, and we all had a very fine sense of enjoying being together. Beforehand, Khánum was talking a little bit with Michael about trees and was obviously well informed on the subject. And they were discussing various and sundry different kinds of trees and things that interested her and interested him. And she said that the Guardian had very much liked gardens and was dragging her continuously to see one garden or another, and regularly went to the famous, I don't remember the name, famous botanical garden as I gathered in London when they were there.

[2:16:40] Then later in the afternoon, we went to Torbeck. We went directly from Michael's there, and Michael picked up several truckloads of people in different places, and by the time he was finished, we had over 50 people, almost all of them young men. Only a couple of women in the crowd. And Khánum gave a talk here. This was in the home of a fellow named Judy [ph] who's one of Joe's assistants. What's his first name? Ydris [ph] or something like that. And she used here an analogy of-- she used a mirror, which she had in her purse. And the sun was setting. She went out just outside the door and caught a ray of sun and beamed it into the dark room and explained how we could be like mirrors, shining light, even into dark places or something to that effect. Very nice little analogy. And I was only half listening because I was, at that time, being transported with all kinds of lofty emotions and had the feeling that I get only in very occasionally of sudden perspective, sort of the feeling that one gets when one gets to the top of a mountain and one suddenly sees all the mountains and valleys going off into the distance. And you get a grasp of the overall direction of things and the lay of the land as it were and how you should proceed down through the valleys to wherever it is you want to go. And I was thinking about writing my book and taking a year off from the fund and how important that really is that I do that, and feeling more confirmed on that decision and thinking about all things of that nature, you know, trying to plot a course ahead.

[2:18:38] I had gone in the morning with Michael to try to find Pierre Legé [ph] who was a prominent, a member of a prominent family and an agronomist and working apparently in the [?] or alcohol factory that his father has in the middle of Cayes, making alcohol from sugar cane, educated in Holland. And he said - he had met the Currellys and was going to distribute some of their fertilizer in that part of the country, and had agreed to arrange a boat for us. And we didn't know whether the arrangements were definite yet. We'd just gotten a message through the Currellys, so I felt it was important to try to reach him. We went looking for him in the morning in Michael's truck with one of the local Baháʼís, stopped at the factory and met his father, and he said that Legé had gone off to Miragoâne to see some clients or something and would be back later in the afternoon. So after this meeting, it was getting dark. It was dark, I think by the time we left Torbeck. We thought it best to try to contact him and go to his house before it got too late. We're supposed to leave the next day on this boat. So we drove up to, after leaving off Rúhíyyih Khánum at the hotel, we drove up to his house, which is on a hill just on the road, going out of town. And he wasn't there, but we left, I left a little note on the back of my card for him. And we got back in time to have dinner around 8:30 at the hotel. That was because we'd already paid with the hotel for the meals. Violette and Khánum and I ate there, and Michael went off with René to eat at his house.

[2:20:28] During that dinner, we talked a little bit about encouragement and about the problem of Western women exploiting their husbands and particularly the business about encouragement. And I talked a little bit about, very briefly about my work situation, and how difficult it is to not be encouraged. And Khánum listened very intently to that, which was unusual for her without saying much, and then she said that she thought about it, paused. And then she said her mother had certainly encouraged her father but she didn't remember her father encouraging her mother. And Violette said, well, there are, there was unusual people and their mother was probably one who are so dedicated to the Faith that they don't really need encouragement from other people. They're solid and so like a rock inside in their dedication, but we all agreed that encouragement is really necessary for 99% of humanity. And Khánum deplored egoism, that that's really, that the base of all these problems is egoism. Then they retired early after dinner and I'd gone to my room and was called out because this fellow Pierre Legé had come with his wife and his little three-year-old son, and I was very pleased to meet them. He was very friendly and younger than I expected. Both of them are very, very nice and extremely cordial and friendly. And they said that the boat had been arranged. And we said that we wanted to leave around 9:00 or so.

[2:22:03] Then after they left, I didn't want to keep them too late. They seem to be coming or going from something. I went to Michael's to tell them that the boat had been arranged all right. There was no problem with it. And I had a very pleasant talk with Michael for about an hour over there, and he gave me a copy of the Baháʼí World with a photograph of the first assembly in Haiti and an article about this lady's visit, Bates [ph] what's her name? Not Emilia but unusual. Gee, and I don't have it here. Anyway, Khánum recognized the name and talked about her at some length another a little later when they were talking about this article. And she had come here with her husband, had a very tragic. She married - oh, yes, I remember. This lady whose articles in the Baháʼí World had been on pilgrimage or something and had become engaged, I think, to Ruhi Afnan. And who was it? Millie Collins [ph] or somebody was very much opposed, and they were worried about it. And Ruhi left, only then to come to the U.S. without the Guardian's permission, and it was two days, apparently before he landed in New York or wherever it was he landed. This lady eloped with a Harlem black jazz player or something like that, thereby saving herself from Ruhi Afnan. And they came pioneering here in Haiti. And Khánum had a high opinion of this lady, although I think she was, if I remember correctly - I should check - this is one of the people who signed these articles with association to the Baháʼí Cause, this extraordinary document from 1951.

[2:23:51] Anyway, we retired early. Well, it wasn't that early, I guess, after I finished talking with Michael and had a very, very sound sleep that night. On Monday, which was then the first of November, Khánum mentioned just in passing as we were, she was complaining about something hurting or something. We were outside. She said that in her family, the bottom of the person was called the sit upon and that she thought that was a useful term. I had breakfast again with Khánum and Violette, and I’d forgotten to tell them that before what time, everybody was planning to leave, which was people were going to come in at 8:30. And they knocked on the door and they hurried up and came out about 8:15, but we were still in the middle of breakfast when people started to arrive. First, Michael Bannister and René at 8:30, and very shortly after, followed by Pierre Legé. And they all gathered around, and we had a pleasant time talking, finishing breakfast. Waited forever for the bread to get toasted or the butter to arrive, or something or other. People are very lackadaisical in this place. And then they had to go off and get their things together and one thing or another. But this man Pierre Legé was very patient with us. And then we went to the port and got in this little tiny boat about 9:30, which I have pictures of, and a little minuscule motor on the back, and put-put-put headed off towards the Île-à-Vache, which is one of the three goals for opening these areas, three islands that are supposed to be opened in this phase of the Seven Year Plan.

[2:25:30] We arrived there about an hour and a half later, about 11:00, having passed along magnificent coastline of this island with very, very picturesque scenes. It was market day, and some people have already left the market and were walking along the edge of the island going home, sort of some cliffs and beaches and palm trees. The women wear very bright colors. And there was one woman with an extremely bright green. They have very, very light green. It's high visibility, kind of green skirt and a white blouse, I think, and a bright red plastic something or other on her head and off in the distance moving along a couple of other people. Very, very picturesque. The wind came up and towards the end, we were getting lots of splashes. Those of us who were in the front were soaked, by the time we got there, in salt water. And Khánum was sitting in the middle in the back with an umbrella to keep her protected from the sun. And Violette fell and they broke the handle of the umbrella and she got a rather bad scrape on her knee. I didn't realize at the time that it was as serious as it was. It could have been much worse, I guess. She could really hurt herself, all the pitching to and fro, but it was quite an adventure. We had been running around during the week to arrange a boat and had a Belgian with a yacht who was gonna charge $30 a person, which would have been something on the order of $300 or more dollars for the trip. And that seemed exorbitant, and I decided that Khánum wouldn't agree to that and that it was far too much for a day's excursion and all that and probably not appropriate to arrive in such a fancy boat either. So we're happy to have this small boat, although he wants $100 and it was really more than was reasonable for a day's work.

[2:27:23] And we got to this market town or little town where the market was in full swing and meandered through the market from one end to the other. And then Khánum wanted to go back and look for some kind of a little enamel blue dish that she was interested in finding. Very crowded and we took pictures there, and the people all wanted to get into the picture. And so as soon as you saw something he liked in the way of the things that are being sold, all these kids would get immediately in front of your camera. And although they were very nice, if you asked them to move, they'd make an effort, but usually the crowd was too big and they couldn't move away very much. They were very, very nice people, extremely warm and open and friendly and always pulling at you and saying blah and asking for a little money but very good natured. Then some of the, we'd brought these two assistants and another young man who said he had relatives there and René. One assistant was Gaston, the other one was whatever his name is, Judy [ph]. So we were a little group and they had sort of scattered off to find out what was going on. They found a place to have a meeting and the magistrate, the local magistrate, was there, only lived up on the hill but he was there for some reason. And we decided to teach him first and spent about half an hour talking with him and showing him the teaching book. And he decided to become a Baháʼí and said he liked it very much.

[2:28:51] Then we got a table, and pretty soon some cups appeared and chairs and various things from this house of this lovely lady with seven children who was living there. And we got out all our things. We brought all kinds of provisions to be sure that we had enough and spread them all out on the table, and nuts and bananas and the fellow had gotten us coconuts. So we had coconut to drink and peanut butter and jelly and one thing or another. And we had a very nice meal there with all these people gathered around watching every bite that we're taking. We invited the magistrate to join us and sat there rather oddly in the middle of this crowd of people. And some people came by and were very interested to know what was going on and we decided we should set a time for the meeting. And so we said one o'clock and we actually started the meeting about 2:00, I think. And it went on for about an hour. René was talking, just René. Khánum didn't say much of anything. And then a rather noisy young man, a tall fellow, showed up and started talking a great deal. And we kept asking him to be quiet because it was our time to talk, having come such a long way. And he couldn't resist talking some more so eventually they decided to, Khánum got up and went with the magistrates to talk with him off by the sea. And then they decided, I guess, to break it up and there was just a mad rush when we took out literature. People were most anxious to get anything. They love things given away, and people are very poor here in Île-à-Vache. The island had been destroyed, apparently, or damaged greatly in the hurricane and suddenly, the staple of the economy was vetiver grass, which they make oil from for perfumes, and the market is going out of that. It was overtaxed and factory that belonged to Pierre Legé actually had been closed. So they really have hard times over there.

[2:30:52] Anyway, they were just a mob scene where we were signing up people as fast as they could write with two pens available. And after a while, Khánum and Violette went off to find some kind of toilet facilities. And they said they were lucky to find anything with four walls and a door. And then they went to the boat, which we weren't aware of and were waiting for us. And she'd sent Gaston back but he took 20 minutes for some reason to go this short distance. He must have been distracted by someone on the way. And meanwhile, we were waiting for her, and I was enjoying very much having this cutest little girl on my lap who was the youngest of this family of seven. And several people told me that I could have her if I wanted. The mother didn't say that, but some other people did, and I think they were quite serious. Beautiful people, really very, very warm feelings and lovely, lovely place. I took a number of pictures there. All the palm trees and the very clean, picturesque little houses and very warm and interested people, and lots of scenes that I won't soon forget that little tiny girl carrying a great big rolled up mat bigger than she was and another girl that couldn't have been more than about five riding on a horse with all the purchases from the market and her little brother or something was even smaller following along behind, carrying something without any evidence of any adult with him, and lots of lovely scenes of people, which I wish I could have taken more pictures of. Wonderful, wonderful faces, but I didn't want to disrupt the meeting too much so I mostly took pictures just until the meeting and things that would be useful for historical purposes and for Baháʼí news and so forth. I had only taken one camera. I really regretted that because I could have used black and white film, too, but I didn't want to interrupt things too much by taking a lot of pictures.

[2:32:45] Then we began to think that it was time to get going. And Khánum was tired, and she got very cross with Gaston for taking so long, and letting us know she had to come herself to find out what was going on. And we packed up our things in a hurry and went off and got in the boat. And she and Violette were rather grumpy. I think Violette's knee must have been hurting, I wasn't aware of that, from her fall. And Khánum was a little bit grumpy about this. She kept talking about she should throw him overboard, you know, that kind of thing [laughs]. That didn't last too long. We'd gotten within fairly good sight, close distance of Les Cayes after a long ride - shorter than before though. We had the wind behind us this time and no splashing. And lo and behold, the motor just dies, all of a sudden "bzzzz", stops. And there we were, floating around in the waves. And I'd been thinking of the analogy of Mr. Faizi of us being all voyagers in the ark. We discussed that and we're enjoying that, being together in this tiny boat, and all of a sudden it began to get a little bit serious. The sun was going down, and here we were stranded and he kept trying to start the engine that obviously wasn't going to go. And there was gas, and there wasn't anything obvious to do to repair it. He had only an old rusty pair of pliers and absolutely nothing in the way of tools or anything. He didn't even have oil locks in this thing but we, eventually Khánum insisted that we do something. And so they got the rope and tied the oars to the side of the boat. And Michael and this young man who was with the captain began to row. And the captain did absolutely nothing. He just sat there. And we got a little closer and we waved at sailboats going by in different directions. None of them stopped. And then a small sailboat came out of nowhere and apparently had gotten the message that we were stranded and came to help us. And they came roaring up in about face, which is very tricky in a sailboat, and we managed to get our anchor over to them. And they towed us back into the port and I got some, Khánum insis--

[2:34:56] This is the evening of November 2nd, 1982 and I'm continuing. This is the third tape of some notes and so forth on the visit of Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette Nakhjavani here in Haiti. I was on the last tape describing our return yesterday from opening the Isle of Île-à-Vache, and that Rúhíyyih Khánum had asked me to get a picture of the sailboat towing us into the harbor. So I climbed up to the front of the boat, found out I was feeling a bit weak-kneed from all the tossing around, and got a number of pictures, I hope that came out, of this sailboat, the young man leaning way out on one side. [unintelligible] towing us into the port. And I forgot to mention that we had at least 25, I think, enrollments on the island, and very successful opening. Although, of course, Rúhíyyih Khánum mentioned obvious that the deepening - or not deepening, but follow-up, going back and continuing the work there - is very, very important. And we were very pleased to see that this young man, Pierre Legé had become worried that we hadn't come in yet. He'd asked us to come for drinks at 6:00. And here it was 5:00 already and we hadn't arrived, 5:30 I think by the time we got into, actually docked at the port. And he kindly, he’d felt that he should come down and find out what was happening. He said he thought it was, thinking about it, it was a small boat and he was a little worried. So there he was, waiting for us and we were happy to see him. We decided to pay the fellow only $80 instead of the $100 he had asked, and he was very unhappy about that but it was tough luck. And we agreed to go up to Legé’s house at 6:30 after washing up a bit.

[2:36:56] So all of us were feeling a bit distinctly sick by this time, all this bouncing around and has stopped for gas. We saw Samuel Zendiq [ph] happen to be passing by at that moment. Then we went to the hotel, and I had the most pleasant cold shower I’ve ever had in my life yet after all those, all that salt water and dust and everything. And we got his house cleaned up and drove up with Pierre and Michael Bannister joined us. And we drove up to Legé’s home on the mountain, with almost full moon that night. And some of the voodoo drums going in the distance because these two days, yesterday and today are the - today was the day of the dead. Yesterday was a holiday, too, in preparation for the day of the dead. We had a very nice conversation. Khánum was very careful to not say anything directly about the Faith, but just very indirect teaching, mentioning their many experiences with Baháʼís and one thing or another. It turns out that John Currelly had given them a book about the Faith, The Renewal of Civilization in French, although we weren't aware of that, but the idea was just to make a friendly contact. And we had a very pleasant time with them, and got back to the hotel about 8:30 I guess, because dinner was served until 9:00. Oh, I see in my notes here. Well, I'll mention that in a minute, but I'm not sure that the 1902 that I mentioned in relation to Khánum’s history was, I think I was confusing that maybe with the next topic.

[2:38:31] While we were at the Legé’s, Violette told a story at Khánum's request about the King of Uganda. Apparently the first missionaries, Anglicans, British had come in 1902 and the king, they'd said they believed in one God and the king had said he believed in one God so that was fine. And he agreed with their religion and gave them permission to come. And they came a couple of years later, but it was a combination of missionaries and colonizers, and they didn't give him any choice. And he was required to sign a contract or agreement or something of that kind and agreed to become an Anglican. So he gathered all of his chiefs together, and he said, - no, I guess it's the first time he gathered them all together and said he'd become a Christian, they should become Christians. So they became Christians. But then the Anglicans came, and then after that, the Catholics came and they began to fight with each other. And there were apparently some very bloody conflicts in 1910, if she has her dates right, because the pope came in 1960 and she thought that was the 50th anniversary of that battle, in which many people died, apparently. And they were fighting each other terribly. And towards the end of his life - I have to get the name of this king from her because the histories were all written by the missionaries and don't tell it right. But towards the end of his life, he gathered all of his chiefs together again. And he said, "Listen" - do you have to get this right, the story right? He said that he was very sorry that these people had come, that before the Christians had come, they had battled other tribes but they certainly hadn't had brother against brother and hadn't killed each other. And now these religions had torn the country apart, and he himself wanted to be buried according to the old beliefs before they become Christians, which happened and the Christians in their book say that he came to the gates of paradise and turned away and went back. But in fact, it's a very good demonstration of how the Christians had not done what one would have hoped that they would have done, and it instead brought a great deal of conflict and disagreement. And his tomb is now or his grave is now still a sight of reverence for visits and so on in the part of many Ugandans, apparently. Well, I've reached my limit for this evening. It's late and I have to get some rest, so I'll end here and continue later. I've gotten up to the middle of yesterday, the first of November, and this is late in the evening of the second of November.

[2:41:19] Well, it's now Saturday morning, November 6th. Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette left yesterday for their trip to Hinche and Cap-Haïtien, Saint-Marc, and Artibonite. And I went out and saw a movie last night and slept for 10 hours and feel very much refreshed, so I tried to get back to continuing and finishing these notes. I clarified with Violette a couple of days ago the story about the king of Uganda. His name was Muteesa I, and he was known as the Kabaka of Buganda, with a B, that meaning the king. The agreement was signed in 1902 between himself and the Anglican missionaries and representatives of the new colonial power. And apparently, they must have come then, about two years before for the first time. And the great big battles she thought were in 1910 or 1911. She wasn't quite sure. Going back to now, November the first, on this fantastic trip that we took to Île-à-Vache, on the boat, Rúhíyyih Khánum said that the - we were taking pictures and things. We were on the subject of photography, and she said that the Guardian was an enthusiast of photography from his youth. And reading between the lines, it sounded as though he didn't think it was dignified for him to go around the holy places taking pictures or something because Khánum said that he would explain to her exactly where she should be to take a picture that he wanted to have taken, which she gave the example of an eagle with its wings outspread. And he said that if she positioned herself just so, she could get the Shrine of the Báb under one wing and the archives building under the other. She explained how very late in his life they had decided to buy a Leica to have a proper camera for her to take pictures. She said that she'd been the official photographer. She said, moving picture photographer, but I'm not sure exactly. Maybe she misspoke or it was super late or something, I don't know.

[2:43:47] Anyway, she was active in taking pictures for the Guardian, and she wanted a proper camera for that. So they decided to get a Leica, but unfortunately, it was very expensive, and beyond the resources that she had. So they decided to make a joint venture of it, and they bought this camera and she couldn't quite remember but she thought it might have been $700, which would've been a lot of money, of course, at that time. But Leicas were very expensive. Anyway, it was a joint venture between she and the Guardian, and then he died very suddenly. He never used the camera and she traveled with it, she said, for several years after his passing, but she was so worried about losing it because of the associations with the Guardian that it was really a great burden on her. And so she bought an Olympus and left the Leica back in the Holy Land, and it's still there. And then she bought a second Olympus when she had been asked by the House of Justice to represent them in Panama. And at the conference, I think it was the meeting of the counselors when the Continental Board was formed and she didn't realize that she was going to be traveling after that and through Mexico, I think, she traveled after that. And she wanted a camera to take pictures in Mexico, so she bought another Olympus, and that one, what was it? It was much lighter, she said, and she liked that. But she sold it and went back to her first one. It was $400. And Lacy Crawford [ph] sold it for her for 380 or something like that and she was pleased with the way it turned out. She told that story several times.

[2:45:25] She was having trouble with this camera, though. She had a long [unintelligible]. It was 150 millimeters, something like that. And she's fussing and having trouble taking the other, the standard lens often, putting that lens on and asked me to load her film for her a couple of times. But she likes very much taking pictures, and she said that many times, they see another Baháʼís that explained to her about depth of focus and how to set her camera for the maximum probability of getting a good shot when you have to snap quickly. And she asked me to explain that to her again, and I don't know, she's very artistic about the whole thing. She loves to go through a market or something like that and take pictures and thinks that atypical. Although she said that, in another time, that she doesn't take pictures of the Baháʼís because there'd be no end to it. She apparently just likes mostly senior. And once she's got enough of one kind of thing, she doesn't bother to take more pictures of it. She said she had lots of pictures of tropical vegetation and things like that. At dinner that evening, after we got back, Violette told of, was talking about Uganda and I think this was when - just a second - Ali was elected to the House of Justice and he came back and everybody was very sad, but I might have mixed that up.

[2:46:59] Anyway, there was a time when they were putting on a skit. The local Baháʼís had put this all together, one Baháʼí in particular, I think who is, I don't remember who it was. And Ali was there in the audience, and it was the history of religion in Uganda, and the first act was about the tribal faiths. She didn't describe what that was. The second act was about the missionaries, and she said that it opened with the missionary shaking hands with everybody. And then he sat down at the table and had lots of, he's counting his money on the table. Whenever anybody came, he'd hide the money under the table, and then he was eating. And again, whenever anybody came, he'd hide the food under the table. And of course, she told this in a way that was very funny. And then the third act was the coming of the Baháʼí Faith. And here Ali was sitting at the table eating whenever anybody came, instead of putting the food in his own mouth, he'd put it in the mouth of whoever had come, was sharing his food, and he never got any. And she said it was very touching and it was funny and sad at the same time for Ali leaving. And another time in my house, Violette was, I think this was when we were sitting alone. Khánum was upstairs and we were talking, and she told about her father a little bit and what he had done for the Cause in Africa. And she had mentioned that he was extremely dedicated to the [unintelligible], which this I'd heard from Bahiyyih, and she mentioned it one episode when he had a business transaction, somebody came and paid him something in the evening at his house. And he had all this money and he went to the home with the treasure. I'm not sure this probably was back in Tahiran or in Iran. But he went to the home with the treasure. Late in the evening, got the fellow out of bed and gave him his contribution of the [Hoguk?] on the money that he had made because he said that he didn't want to die during the night or have something happen to him and not have paid the [Hoguk?] on that money.

[2:49:10] Going back to dinner in Cayes, Khánum said that, just in passing, she leaned over to me even though I was sitting next to her between the two of them, and she said just imagine the love that God must have for mankind. She said we have love that's like, for each other, that is like a little tiny lentil, she said, or like a grain of sand. And so we can just imagine what the love of God must be. Then also in the same meal, she made this very funny noise with her mouth puckered and her throat going up and down, a sort of a [makes funny noises] sound in the back of her throat. And she said that was a Bolles sound, special to the Bolles family, and it scratched the back of the tonsils. And she'd taken some pepper or something and felt like scratching the back of her tonsil so she made this sound. And then she gets this funny, cute, laughing, playful expression on her face, but she likes being playful and having people indulge her. At a later time, she said something to me about how useful my work here in Haiti is and my position for the Faith. And she referred to the evening when we had drinks with Pierre Legé and his wife and said that my few remarks about economics and business and my impression of living in a developing country and so on were worth many teaching books for a person of that kind, essentially irreplaceable and - sorry - confirming my own impressions that this kind of service is useful for the Faith.

[2:50:54] On the second of November - I'm going through my little notes here - at breakfast in the Hotel Concorde in Cayes, Khánum was talking a great deal about primogenitor, and she said the Will and Testament, of course, gave the right of the guardianship to the oldest son unless he were unworthy. And she said that it was also a feature of the will, the system of intestate inheritance of the Báb and adopted by Bahá’u’lláh that the oldest son gets more than the others, which I hadn't remembered. Then she talked about the importance of wills, and she gave an example of Freddie Schopflocher, who apparently, I gather was a Montreal Baháʼí who she had known very well for many, many years. He had broken up with his wife, I think, near the end of his life. Apparently, he'd thrown a lot of things at her or she'd thrown a lot of things at him or something. Anyway, they separated, and he ended up leaving most or perhaps all of his belongings to his housekeeper. And she said there was nothing wrong going on there. He was an old man at that time, but he, you know, his housekeeper had taken care of him, and he left most of his things to her. And the wife whose name I don't remember was a good Baháʼí, and she was planning to challenge the will in the courts. And the Guardian told her, the Schopflocher’s wife that he the Guardian, would remove this woman's voting rights, expel her from the Faith if she challenged the will, that she didn't have the right to do that under Baháʼí law, irregardless of nonBaháʼí law. Very - and she didn't, but a very, very firm, strong statement apparently by the Guardian on the subject.

[2:52:51] Then Khánum talked about lizards. We had little one of these lizard gecko type things come up on the chair and Violette hates them but Khánum loves them. And she was sort of playing with it, and was afraid that somebody's gonna step on it so she carried the chair. It went up on another chair and she carried that chair outside, and the thing jumped off and ran away. And many times in the last few days, she was talking about how strange it was that the Guardian married her because she was known as Mary of the snakes and lizards and things like that, Mary Maxwell, and the Guardian hated all such reptiles and creatures. She mentioned that this breakfast, in that regard, that the Guardian, as I said, had hated snakes, and when they were engaged, he had come out of his room and said that he had just killed a lizard in the room. She didn't see it, apparently, but that's what he told her. And she said that if she had been Mary Maxwell, she would've broken off the engagement immediately, but of course she didn't. And she said that she thought that perhaps the Guardian was testing her obedience. We got going a little bit leisurely, Tuesday morning. And after everything was together and we were out of the hotel and paid and so forth, which I suppose was around 9:30, we went over to Michael Bannister's house and got René there and said goodbye to Michael. It was a very warm and fond farewell. We all felt extremely unified and had a very good experience there. And Michael was very, very sweet. He's really a lovely man, very, very spiritual. I hate to use that term, but that's all I can think of.

[2:54:44] And then we headed off with René in the car, and Violette and the two of them in the back seat, and Khánum in the front. And I have a note here that sometime during that day, Khánum had mentioned that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said that ambition was an abomination in the sight of God. I don't remember the context. Oh, yes, we were talking about the rulers of Haiti, I think, or something like that, some political context. As an aside here, I had the distinct impression that Khánum was intentionally telling me things. She said so several times that she didn't usually talk about touching such a subject because people would misremember and misquote her, and a lot of damage would be done. But she implied that she had an impression that I was more accurate and would be able to remember what she said, and I'm trying here with this tape to be worthy of that confidence. She also said at one point that I was much more of a scholar of the writings than she was, that she grew up absorbing a great deal from her mother and, of course, from 20 years with the Guardian. She said the Guardian had said at some point that - I think Guardian had said - that they were much closer than most husband and wife because she was, after all, both, she was the Guardian's secretary and his housekeeper and his wife, and therefore spent many, many hours with him. And through all of that, a long life had absorbed many, many things, but she couldn't remember where things were in the writings and was not really scholarly about it.

[2:56:24] Anyway, leaving Cayes, Khánum started to tell a story in French, which, because she said Violette had heard it and she wanted René to hear it. Fantastic story about their voyage through Africa, the Guardian and she. And I may get a few details wrong, but I wanted to put down as much of this as I remember, in case it's not readily available someplace else. Her father was going to come, too, but he was not able to travel by land in the more rugged way that the Guardian and she were going to travel, so he was supposed to fly and meet them in Cairo, I think, or someplace. And she said that they were leaving Rhodesia. I don't remember the name of the town now. She said that they wanted to see the Congo. The Guardian had wanted to, and she wanted to, and they couldn't get a visa because the Congo was in Belgian control and they were in a British area. And they were refused the visas and told it was impossible and being war time and all that sort of thing. They were in Rhodesia and they were on their way to the train station, I think, to get a train towards the Sudan. And they passed by a little sign that said "Consulate of the Congo". And so they stopped. And this was a Britisher in his sixties, and they went and talked with him. And he's fumbled for stamps and one thing or another and gave him the visa, which turned out to be quite adequate for their trip to the Congo.

[2:58:08] They then, they took, with this visa, they took a plane from Rhodesia to Stanleyville. They said it was a little plane and it followed the rivers. And when it came to the jungle where the heat was rising, it would go up. And when it came to the river, it would come down again, up and down, up and down. And they arrived, apparently in Stanleyville. And I think it was there that they engaged a car belonging to a Belgian who owned a hotel to drive them to the Sudanese frontier. I'm not sure where the hotel of this Belgian man was, but anyway it was apparently a reasonable car. And this Belgian and the driver, I suppose, were sitting in front and Rúhíyyih Khánum and the Guardian were sitting in the back. They had just headed off and the car hit some gravel or something - it was slippery - and went sailing off the road and landed in a tremendous amount of foliage which broke their fall. And it was just like landing on a pillow, she said. None of them were hurt at all. And she said the Guardian, not being a driver, was not as aware, she thought, as she was, of the danger of this fellow's driving. But they went to a village or something nearby and got all kinds of people, and they came. They lifted the car up, put it back on the road, and off they went with no problem. They had to spend one night sitting up in the car, the Guardian, sitting straight and dignified, and Khánum, apparently next to him. And it wasn't exactly her idea of the way to spend the night.

[2:59:44] And then they went off the next day because there was no place to sleep. I think they maybe had stopped somewhere and been refused lodging, I don't know. I guess that was like some place else she was talking about. There was one day, she said, when they had stopped and she decided to walk ahead. And they were going to come along and pick her up. She said that she wanted some exercise, and so she walked and walked and walked and they hadn't come. And she walked and walked and walked. Eventually, somebody came along in a bicycle and said that the Guardian had been delayed and was very worried about her and if she, you know, would come back or something, I don't know. Anyway, she borrowed this fellow's bicycle and bicycled back as quickly as she could, and it turned out the Guardian was afraid she would be eaten by lions. And she said, "Oh, Guardian. Lions don't eat people. That's ridiculous." And apparently, though, a lion had eaten somebody on that road not very long before, and that they had told the Guardian and he was very, very concerned. And she mentioned also another time that she'd wanted to go out from the little bungalow wherever they were staying and take a walk, and he disapproved very much. And in general, one gets the impression that here was Mary Maxwell, who loves snakes and adventures and all kinds of things, and the Guardian was restraining her. But she mentioned many times to me, I think perhaps - no, not here but another, other times - that she thought it was perhaps good that she was able to divert the Guardian from his many preoccupations and concerns and that she didn't try to curb this kind of inclination of hers because it was perhaps good for the Guardian, she thought, to have to think about other things, and he usually did. And there were some things, obviously she did curb, but other things she didn't try to, as he put it, for that reason. And she said, also several times, that the Guardian must have seen something in Mary Maxwell if he had, he wanted to marry her.

[3:01:50] So they arrived in the Sudan, and they were immediately arrested because they didn't have the proper documents or something or other. And they told the authorities that they should check with the British governor of the Sudan, who she thought was named Sytes but she couldn't remember, because the Guardian had known him in the holy land. And they did check, and he, in fact, told him that the Guardian was all right, you know, and everything was okay and that was taken care of. And then when they got to, I'm not quite sure about this but I think it was when they got to Khartoum from the border frontier town, they were invited to this man's home for lunch. And she said it was awful because they didn't have the proper clothing for such an occasion. The Guardian had insisted that she get a khaki suit and pants and that sort of thing, appropriate for the tropics. And she had a dress, or dresses, I suppose, but they were for colder climates, and so it was terribly hot and uncomfortable. And the Guardian had some kind of a suit, I suppose, but again, it was presumably not appropriate for the climate. And this Governor General had invited an important general in the military field and some other dignitaries, and she said it was really quite a difficult occasion. They also, she also said that they had, late at night, run into her father who just had appeared, and he was the sort of person she said who was never fazed by anything and didn't think it was at all extraordinary for them to meet in the middle of the night in Khartoum. And then he went on his plane, apparently to Cairo. She also mentioned there was a tablet of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, different subject now, describing explicitly how children are ordinarily conceived and that Christ was not conceived in this way. And the Guardian had referred to this tablet, which is not translated. And she said it's very clear that Baháʼís believe in immaculate conception, and that was a surprise to her when she learned it. I'm not sure that I mentioned this before, at another time earlier on this trip, she had said that, when the subject of a recording of Shoghi Effendi came up, she said that she had never dared to make a recording of him because although she wanted to many times secretly make one, but it would have been disobedient. And there was one time at the pilgrim table when a pioneer from Africa, who she named but I don't remember now who it was, had put a tape recorder on the table and asked the Guardian if she could record a short message for the African believers. And she said the Guardian hesitated, and she held her breath. And then he said no, that was not possible.

[3:04:47] We were driving along in a leisurely fashion on our way back to Port-au-Prince. And Violette suddenly said that she had remembered that we were supposed to stop in two villages on the way back, and I'd completely forgotten about that. But I got, we stopped and I got out my schedule and got the names of the two places, which was Saint-Michel-du-Sud and [?], something like that. And René said that he had an idea where these places were. They were just before, I think, getting to Miragoâne. And so we headed off again wondering though whether anything had been arranged because nobody has said anything does. And lo and behold, René told me to slow down and then to stop. And there we were in Saint-Michel-du-Sud. And he went off here and there, and he had sort of a feeling of where the right place was. And he saw a home with a picture of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá or something inside, and out came this very large man with a very sad expression on his face and his big feet into shoes that apparently weren't quite large enough and had the toes cut off. And he was standing on the heels, you know, the back of the shoes folded down so it was more like a sandal. And he talked with Rúhíyyih Khánum for a few minutes at the car, and she asked him why he looked so sad, whether there was a tragedy of some kind in his family. And he said no, and he said it was a shame that they hadn't been notified because nobody'd been there for several months to visit. But it took time to notify everybody and get a meeting together so we just said hello and then goodbye to him and headed off onto [?]. In [?], there was, they were, it wasn't really a town center. Saint-Michel-du-Sud is a little more built up. There were just houses so stretched along the road for quite some distance.

[3:06:42] And so we drove along and stopped in the sun. And René went off and he walked quite a long ways. And then he was to be seen walking back along the road and so we backed up to where he was. And he said he'd found some Baháʼís so we turned around and drove off the road under a tree and some shade, and went and talked to these people. It was a little tiny house with about three couples gathered around. And on one side was a man who turned out to be a Baháʼí was giving a lesson in sewing. He had a sewing machine on his front porch, and a few people gathered around. And Khánum got up and went over to say hello to him and was very cordial. And there was another house on the other side, again with some Baháʼís in it, apparently, and a very pretty little garden with flowers and some conch shells bordering the flowers. Just two clumps, but very well tended. And we sat there at the porch for maybe half an hour, 45 minutes, talking with these people, showed them the teaching book which they had seen, and some pictures. And Violette, they went, one of these people went to his home and came back with a postcard of Baháʼís in Uganda, which is the same picture as in the teaching book, and Violette said that she knew all those people and was pointing out who was who. And it was very nice. And then we were asking about almonds because I wanted to know what these funny little trees that are flat like an umbrella along the road were. And they said those were [almondiae?]. And so we were curious, and they went and they got a nut for us and broke it open. And Khánum and Violette had each half of this very small nut inside, and said it tasted just like an almond. And later John Currelly told us that they make the teeth brown. Children love them though. The children eat the whole fruit, not just the nut. So we went to the car and got some almonds out of the mixture of nuts that Khánum and Violette had brought with them. And we had enough to give one to everybody, which is about a dozen, I guess. And they all enjoyed very much eating our almonds and comparing them to their almonds. And there were many smiles all around and very cordial feeling.

[3:08:44] And then eventually we got back in our car and went on our way, came back, left off René in Carrefour. Khánum was busy taking pictures of the backs of the tap taps. She just loves this native type of art that was used on transportation around the world, and she'd see a truck and we'd sort of chase it and try to get behind it. And it would stop and we would stop and she'd be fussing with her camera and having lots of fun taking pictures of these trucks. Then we got home and - oh, no, before that, we stopped, we came through Port-au-Prince, of course. And it was a holiday and coming up the mountain, she said, she was feeling full of beans still and she wanted to stop at the Currellys and tell them about all the adventures. So we stopped there, and Deb was there and Provee [ph] and Provee’s kids. And we sat down and Deb was all a little flustered and running about. And Khánum said something about how big the cups were and have said, "Oh, I'm so sorry." She's very sort of nervous about Khánum, as one understandably is. And we told some of our adventures and one or another. And then John came in and he's been, he didn't come with us on the weekend, although it had been planned because the government [Idai?] had put out an offer, a request for offers for a large supply of fertilizer. And he went to get his plant together in time to meet that worth quarter million dollars in sales, apparently, and would be very good excuse to get the factory going quickly and get a good reputation, too. So he'd been working very hard and putting up machinery, and he came back. He had a cold and he had a headache. He'd been way up high someplace where nobody else wanted to go, getting the machinery put in place. And he had these funny round glasses on that I didn't know he wore, but he sat down on the other side of the room and drank some water and perked up a little bit with all of our news. And we had a pleasant talk there.

[3:10:42] And then after, I don't know, more than an hour, I suppose, we got ourselves back in the car and went up to the house, and the ladies enjoyed immensely washing their hair and taking a hot shower. I took a dip in the pool because I didn't want to take the hot water while they were using the shower. And when it sounded like they had finished, I had a shower myself. And we all felt very much refreshed. Then we had dinner and, I don't remember if it was then or after, Khánum was talking about - well, I mentioned something about Dizzy Gillespie and that he had described the houses being heavy and they liked that. And she was talking about him and said that he'd pulled her aside someplace or other in London or somewhere where he had been this performing artist. And he asked her if she wanted to marry again, and she said she had had a king and would not like, would not be able to find another one. And that he had accepted that answer, and he liked that answer, she said. Sometime around the time when we were visiting these two villages that were right on the road, Khánum had mentioned a country where she had been where some people had been teaching at villages along the road like that. There are quite a few of them, apparently, easy to get to. And there was a Persian lady who's married to someone who had a good job and a reasonable income in some in this country. And the lady was bored, she said, and had gone and gotten a job as a clerk in a big department store in order to pass the time and make a little extra money. And she said that she felt that was a crime. It was very strong language. Ah, here, this lady was who could perfectly well have gone out and helped with the teaching work in these villages, and instead she had occupied herself in a relatively useless activity in the city. And as I say, she's very strong language about that, how important it is to afford the pioneers to devote themselves to this work of teaching in the villages. Further note to this idea that she had not tried to curb some qualities of herself because she thought it was a good distraction for the Guardian. She, I think, had used the, had mentioned the thought that she was unpredictable and had very wide interests, and it was those qualities which she thought were perhaps useful in distracting the Guardian.

[3:13:04] At breakfast, the next morning, this would be Wednesday, November the 3rd. She talked on at some length about the difficulty of choosing counselors. I don't remember now how the subject came up. Oh, yes, that evening after we've gotten back, this would have been November 2nd, after Rúhíyyih Khánum had gone up early to bed, I got a call from Don Davis, and he told me that he and Mary had decided to go pioneering to Tonga, and they planned to leave in early January, if possible. And, of course, this was a tremendous blow to me, and I slept very badly. I was pacing all around and trying to figure out the implications and what I could possibly do about it. And it was very difficult for me because I've been feeling very sad about leaving Haiti and particularly with the many lessons learned from Rúhíyyih Khánum about how important it is to be in a country like this, how much more useful for the Faith than being in big industrialized cities, no matter how fine a career one might have or how much money one might be making. And so-- and of course, losing all of the beauty in the very foreign experiences of being in a country like this is very sad. And so I want to really take advantage of the last months that I have here in Haiti to get back some of the investment that I'd made here in contacts and meeting people and learning the language and so on, trying to be of use to the Faith. So I was very sad and very upset about having yet another problem in the U.S. to worry about, to take me away from here in addition to all the other ones that I have.

[3:14:48] So anyway, I mentioned this tour in the morning. She asked me how I was in the morning. I said I wasn't very well. And right away before she, she's just coming down the stairs, she gets this astonished look on her face when you say anything, anything that was slightly out of the ordinary and pays full attention. And so I told her and she said, "Well, it's shocking." She said, or something like that, and, "Didn't you have a contract?" And I said the contract called for two months and that's the notice that he'd given. Anyway, I think it was that subject. I'd asked her whether there was a newly appointed Tongan counselor, and she said yes, there was but she couldn't remember the name. And then she'd mentioned how hard it was to, this was at breakfast, for them to choose counselors. She said she ordinarily wouldn't talk with anyone about this, and it's obviously something that one wouldn't discuss a great deal. She said they had long consultations at the International Teaching Center on the problem of finding counselors, and she said the Pacific had been the hardest, I think as many as possible counselors who are native to that place but the difficulty of finding people of the right quality. And she said it's not at all easy to find people who are of that level and that they have to be very careful. And she thought it was very wise that the House of Justice had set a term to the counselors because it's so hard to make someone, to unmake them a counselor. When it's a term, that facilitates that process if, I suppose, if someone doesn't work out.

[3:16:21] She said in passing on this topic that she herself thought it was a tragedy. That was the word that she used, that the Faith had not produced a better person to be the wife for the Guardian. Violette strongly disapproved and frowned, and Khánum said, "I know you don't agree with me, but I have a right to my opinion and that's my opinion." She thought that the Guardian had made the best of what was available, and she said she was no Cleopatra, quote unquote. And she said that the Guardian was not necessarily happy with the quality of the Hands that were available to him, that instead of praising God for how wonderful the Hands where, she said if anything, he was just getting along with what he had at hand. Then she said that she had been upset - not upset but had disagreed with the decision of the House to make the boards of counselors continental. And she said it's a good idea not to be opinionated about things that one doesn't necessarily know about, but obviously she was opinionated. She was making a comment about herself, I think. But she said that that had gone against her understanding from the Guardian of what the future of the institution would be. And she explained that the Guardian had many times, apparently, said in the Holy Land that the Hands in the future would have their own staffs and their own region of the world and would be, at the closest thing that one could compare it to, would be like Cardinals, and that she said that this making the counselors continental was working in the opposite direction. But then she said that she thought that perhaps this was wise as an interim measure because when there's a war and a breakdown of communications, the counselors will be the only institution networks on a broader scale and can bring together countries that have very limited capabilities, each one of them and that therefore, this continental function of the counselors may prove very important at this time. But that in the future, after these problems pass, it may very well go in the other direction back to smaller units and more independent.

[3:18:52] She also mentioned, I don't remember now the context. She's talking about marriage and that sort of thing, and that she thought that in the future, people would marry younger and that particularly for young people, they were very strong sexual impulses. She said that obviously, what she's often said, that you have sex impulse and that the proper or that you have a, you have a flood of affection and love, feelings, falling in love, which is common for young people. Yeah, the tape is coming near the end, so I think I'll turn it over here and continue on the other side. She said the young people have this natural propensity to fall in love and want to express their love through sex and the appropriate context for that, of course, is marriage. She said that sex was like a wildfire that runs through the veins of young people, something like that. I'm not sure that I mentioned this earlier in the tape just to set the record straight. The wife of Dr. Mazjoub in Miami is the daughter of the Hand of the Cause of Varqá, and that's why I suppose they've been going up to Canada from time to time because Varqá, he was now living in Canada. On Wednesday, I had to go into the office and try to get caught up a little bit in my work, which I was very concerned about. And they have made arrangements with Provee [ph] the day before. And she came to get them, I think rather late, about noon or something, and took them up to the mission for a pleasant lunch. And they both enjoyed her very much and had a very high regard for her courage and her energy and her enthusiasm and bubbliness and all those things. And we had arranged at the spur of the moment to have a meeting with the pioneers that evening at the Currellys. We'd originally thought it would be on Thursday because Wednesday was supposed to be the feast night, but then it turned out the feast had been delayed today because Natalie wasn't feeling well over the weekend and didn't get the notices out in time. So we had lots of phone calls all around that evening.

[3:21:04] Then Julie [ph] called me and she was upset because I'd forgotten to stop by the center on the way back with Khánum to get cakes that she'd baked and the tea. And then furthermore, she had to feast on Wednesday night in Port-au-Prince and wasn't sure she could get away and would miss the meeting with Khánum. And I got really depressed because after this very exalting experience of the last few days and the trip to Cayes and everything working out so well, to suddenly be back in the city and have the pioneers be a cause of hardship and difficulty, kind of rough. And everybody wanted to know the news, and they were all calling. I couldn't get a minute to try to get myself together and get myself clean and rested and so forth. That worked out all right, though. Julie [ph] found George, got George to agree to open the center and close it up and serve the refreshments and so on. And she was able to come to the meeting although she was very tired. She gets up at the crack of dawn in the morning before the crack of dawn. And I got the cakes from her. I guess, I sent my driver on Wednesday, and he got them from her so I had those worked out all right. So they invited, because the Baruks, we called the Baruks. The Baruks came all the way from Jacmel for this meeting, and because they were coming, she invited them to dinner. This was Wednesday evening. So they arrived, and we sat around the living room for some time before dinner was ready, talking about portraits of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. And I didn't get all of it. I'm really sorry. I didn't because it was very interesting conversation. Moro remembered all these different things hanging on the walls in different places in the Holy Land. And I just don't have a good mind for that, and I hadn't been on pilgrimage for a long, long time so I don't remember them.

[3:22:57] But they were discussing each portrait, and she had said in very strong terms, which she had mentioned before, that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had three different pictures: full face, silhouette and three-quarters, which were taken, I think all of them in Paris and which He himself signed and gave away to people. And these are the three pictures that she had put in The Priceless Pearl, I guess. Anyway, I'm not sure, but that she’d used them in one of her books. And these were the ones that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá liked and the ones that he thought were most like him. And she said all these people, like the Baruks and everybody else who didn't remember ‘Abdu’l-Bahá - she herself didn't remember Him because she was too young - couldn't tell what was a good likeness and what wasn't and that we should use His own judgment and not--. She feels very strongly about these Baháʼís who make portraits of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. She thinks it's a very bad idea. She talked about one lady who would send her a picture of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and with a little note that said it was her first effort at painting anything. And she said it wasn't bad for a first effort, but just the very idea of trying to paint ‘Abdu’l-Bahá for your first effort she found shocking. So they talked about these various portraits and there were some, she said that the Guardian, I think she said, and certainly she didn't like the portrait that Julia Thompson had made, even though she was outstanding portraitist at the time. And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had sat for hours for that portrait, and Juliet was commanded thousands of dollars for her portraits in New York and was very well known. But there are two or three hanging in different places that, you know, pass the stringent test and seem to be more or less all right.

[3:24:49] But she told about one portrait that she didn't like and the Guardian didn't particularly like, but the International Council all liked it. Everybody else liked it. So the Guardian agreed that it could be hung in the western pilgrim house, and it was put way down out of the way somewhere. And she said that the wives came through and painted the pilgrim house - maybe it was after the Guardian's passing - to make it suitable for the House of Justice, and they did a complete refurbish of this place. And lo and behold, this painting goes [imitates whip sound] and reappears at the top of stairs or the head of the room or something like that in a place of honor and that she objects very much but that's where it is. And it's funny, you know. And she said that she has a running battle with Paul every time - Paul Haney - every time she goes into his office, he's got some picture that she thinks is abominable. And it was sent over by the House of Justice. And she says the House should keep to its own affairs and the International Teaching Center keep to it. And Paul has promised her that when they move to the new building that they will, that he won't move that particular portrait. She's very funny on this subject and I just wish I could remember more of the details. They also talked about portraits of Bahíyyih Khánum as well, and she said the Guardian was peculiar in that he didn't mind repetition. If there was one picture that he liked or one subject that he liked, he had lots of copies of it here and there. And he had many pictures of the resting place of the Greatest Holy Leaf and on his desk and around his room, and he didn't tire of it. And she said other people tend to tire of things and want to have a change, but that wasn't true of the Guardian. If he liked it, he liked it permanently. Another time she described his room. Several times she mentioned that he didn't have a bureau, he had a bed, a table and a desk. And they were all in one room, and many times she tried to get the Guardian to sleep in another room, an upstairs room that was free. And he refused. He just, she thought it would be good for him to have a change of scene at least that much between the bedroom and the workroom. But no, he liked that arrangement.

[3:26:57] That evening she had bought some corn meal on the way. She'd been looking for cornmeal, and she didn't like what was available in the market. She said it was either too fine or too coarse, and she found some. We stopped by the side of the road where there was this fellow selling sculpture. And she remarked that there were two of them near each other, just out of Miragoâne and going over the mountains. No, between Miragoâne and the junction to Jacmel. And both of them, she said, were unfinished. They didn't finish their work. They had good concepts, but didn't finish it. And particularly one thing fascinated her, there was a longboat that both of these guys were doing with faces in them looking up out of the boat. And she said she had seen that somewhere in Africa and she couldn't for the life of her remember where. Neither could Violette, but they had seen that motif somewhere in Africa and that interested her very much. But she talked at length with these, with us and with these people about how they needed to learn to finish their work, and how some training would do some good, and she wished she had some time to to train them in it and so forth. Anyway, she'd bought this corn meal, and we had nothing to put it in except in a sort of a carved wooden scoop bowl thing that she had bought with a handle on it. So she put this cornmeal in this bowl and put it on the floor between her feet. And we travelled that way, getting in and out of the car and so on. She was very careful about it. And when we got home, she was very interested in having it cooked and I didn't know anything about that so I told her she should give instructions to the cook. She feels the head of the house should give instructions to the cook, but I went with her into the kitchen and we gave it to Leon [ph] who said she could prepare it.

[3:28:35] And Leon [ph] wanted to make that on Thursday night, and she had already in mind a [tactile legroom?] for Wednesday night. But I told her, really, Khánum was looking forward to it, and she'd better make it for Wednesday night. So she made it into a big pot with some cheese and ground beef and a very good, and Rúhíyyih Khánum was most impressed and wanted to know how it was made and so on. And we were having that for dinner, along with some, what was it? Some green beans or something or other. And lo and behold, there's a stone in the cornmeal, and I crunched down on this thing and I didn't know at the time, but I broke a piece out of my lower tooth on the side where I do all my chewing. It felt like something was stuck in the tooth and there were these sharp edges sticking out. I didn't want to interrupt the conversation. I didn’t say anything and was very worried about my mouth all the time that this wonderful conversation was going on. Later, I looked at it and there were these two very sharp edges. And a couple of days later, I bought, yesterday I bought some nail files and filed the edges down because there were wearing a raw place into my tongue. It's very painful. So anyway, that evening, we went off to the meeting with the pioneers, got there about 8:00, and that's tape recorded, so I don't need to say anything about that. I may be repeating myself, but I don't want to miss this. She had mentioned more than once that the Guardian had the eastern habit of speaking while he was writing, and he liked to have somebody in the room listening to him while he was writing. In his English writings, Rúhíyyih Khánum was the person who would sit there, and she would, she liked to be busy with her hands so she would do some embroidery or something like that. And he would sometimes ask her if she was listening and she would say, "Yes, Guardian. Yes, Shoghi Effendi, I'm listening."

[3:30:22] Apparently, she called him Shoghi Effendi and not just Shoghi, if she's repeating it correctly. And that she didn't understand his Persian very well because it was a very sophisticated Persian, and so often somebody else who knew Persian would sit there while he was writing his Persian writings. She gave me a chief of telexes to send, all combined together and sent to the Holy Land. And the next morning at breakfast, somehow the subject of her handwriting came up. This would now be the 4th, Thursday the 4th, and she said that her handwriting, she didn't know why it was so bad because she had proper training in it but she acknowledged that her a's were exactly like her o's, or her o's like her a's, excuse me, and that she had trouble with the loop on a "k", and for some reason, the r's didn't have the little thing sticking up property, although it does now, I'd noticed in her handwriting. And she said the Guardian would go through her, the letters that she had written for him and would add the loops on the case and the little things sticking up out of the "r" and would do it very fast going down the page. And she said that he would, unless there were lots of corrections to something she had written, he would black out with this black pen such that nobody could possibly read what was underneath a word that he didn't like and would put an X over a place that needed an insert and then write in the margin what the insert would be. Or if it was one where'd he'd put a little carrot and then have the word written above, but he wouldn't write it himself. He would dictate it to her so that it would all be in the same handwriting. And then he would sign or he would write a little postscript. And she said that it was one letter that went to a National Assembly, where the secretary had been rude to the Guardian and he was furious and he dictated the letter, but he refused to sign it. It was the one letter she remembers that went out without his signature on it, but of course the Assembly knew that it was in her handwriting and that she was the Guardian's secretary, but he wouldn't even have his signature associated with it. She said, if there were lots of corrections, the page would have to be rewritten. There were many things she said, that she'd already answered a similar question, and so she knew what the answer should be, or he would say a few things and she worked very hard. She said, "I'm trying to write the letters properly so that the Guardian wouldn't have an extra burden on his many burdens in redoing those letters."

[3:32:55] She also mentioned, I think it may have been that morning something about having taken a course. I think she said it was the first course in which she'd taken an examination anyway. And McGill [ph] in political economy or something of the kind, and she said that the one thing that she had learned that she appreciated was that she learned the principle of supply and demand. And she said it's been very useful for her because she's realized that the only reason that she's treated with such value is because she's only one of her and therefore the supply is very limited. And it's not because of an intrinsic value, and that's been very helpful for her in curbing her ego. Thursday, they came down to town with me. I left Violette at the British Consul and took Rúhíyyih Khánum to my office where she worked on a telex in the other room for a few minutes. And then Violette called to say that the consul here was an honorary consul and was not authorized to give her a visa. And so Khánum went off with my car to pick her up, and they went to my travel agent to get their tickets back to the States and apparently did all kinds of shopping here in there, buying presents for many, many people. And Oragean [ph] was amused. They went to the pharmacy, and one thing or another, back to the Ambiance, apparently. And then they met Julie [ph] for lunch about noon and went with her to [?], which Khánum said was the best place she'd eaten in town and recommended it very much, so I have to go there sometime. I've never been there. It's the hotel that's down by the sea, not too far from Tiffany and [?] and so on. And I told him to either come back at 3:00, or if they were finished before that, Oragean [ph] could take them up to the house. So they went directly up to the house, apparently after lunch, and Oragean [ph] came down and I meandered up a little later in the afternoon. That evening was the feast night in Pétion-Ville, and we were still trying to make arrangements for the next leg of her trip. There were all kinds of confusions. Julie [ph] told George, or George said that Julie had told her, told him that Khánum wasn't planning to leave on Friday, that she wasn't well. And there were all kinds of confusions at the last minute, and Khánum was getting rather fed up with it. And that day, the 4th, was also the 25th anniversary of the Guardian's passing. Some flowers arrived for Khánum from the House of Justice at the National Center, and I picked them up for her and took them up in the afternoon. And there were, of course, all these telexes from the House of Justice and from [?] and Paul Haney that she wanted answered.

[3:35:55] So where was I? We had all these organizing to do. So we had dinner and then lots of phone calls during dinner, and so on. Linda tried to find out what was going on, who was going to drive her and how we’re going to arrange this. It's very complicated, so she decided that it was better if John came up, John Currelly, and we talked about it in person. And so he came up before the feast, and he brought his gourds to exchange for her dollars. She needed about $1000 worth of goods for this trip. And not having a car during the day, I wasn't able to send it over to his office to get it. And so we worked out all the complexities of different cars going up to Hinche, and cars coming down, people going to the Artibonite and to Cap-Haïtien and so on. The way it finally worked out because Arnold - a part of the problem was that Arnold has a cold and she didn't want to travel with anybody with a cold. And he insisted on coming up Friday in his own car and just trying to stay out of her way but she didn't like that idea at all. She asked John and I to go down and tell him essentially that he should go on Saturday, wait a day and get a little better and go on Saturday. So it was worked out that she was to, Khánum and Violette were to go with Linda. And George finally showed up. It wasn't clear whether he was going to be in the office on Friday and he'd said that he couldn't go over the weekend. But then Friday morning at the last minute, it was discovered that he was there and he was able to go. And so arrangements were made for them to pass by the center and pick him up on their way.

[3:37:31] Then, Arnold is to drive up in his car today, this being Saturday the 6th, with René and Nini [ph] and Nini's brother Boston [ph], Nini being the the maid or cook or whatever of the Currellys, very, very fine Baháʼí. And then Nini and Boston are to be left behind in Hinche when Rúhíyyih Khánum leaves to help with the continuing work there, to carry on a little bit. And Linda is to come back with George and René in Arnold's jeep on Sunday because they all have to, well, René and Linda have to get back at work on Monday and George has to leave again for the Artibonite to arrange radio programs in Saint-Marc and Gonaïves. And then he's going to meet, he's going to go by truck and meet Rúhíyyih Khánum in Cap-Haïtien. So it all worked out, but it rather - and then Arnold hopefully is well enough to help them get from Hinche to Cap-Haïtien. And he comes back in the truck, apparently, somewhere along the line there. So that was quite complicated to work that all out. And Khánum gets a little bit impatient when plans have to be re-calculated all the time.

[3:39:05] So John and I went down to the feast briefly to try to find Arnold, who wasn't there. And we talked with Linda and got her part of the thing straightened out, and she was very worried about having to drive Rúhíyyih Khánum and not knowing the road, and you know, the responsibility of it all. She was feeling uncomfortable and very worried and apprehensive and so on, but I'm sure it'll work out fine when they all get together. And George, of course, will be able to help a lot if he connected with him property. And then we went over to Arnold at the Nord and came down on him pretty hard and got him to agree to go on Saturday, so I hope that all worked out. And then I got back rather late because all these people like to talk at great length, and glued together Rúhíyyih Khánum's broken umbrella, which was broken when Violette fell down and skinned her knee in the boat on the way to Île-à-Vache. And she also had the other earring of the pair that needed repairing, so I glued that together, too. Put a bolt in the umbrella, and I hope that that holds it together. It was a bad, irregular break. And then I got a nice sound sleep myself that night, and I was very pleased after two days of work to be fairly caught up in the office and not as far behind as I thought I was. And I began to sort through the problem with my business, and I think that it will work out probably as long as this person, Nancy Songer is capable of running it for a few months, I can advertise and find the best available, more stable couple or somebody to take it over and move the business to wherever they are if necessary and get it settled in a more permanent way sometime during the next year. And then I'll be more free to go off to other parts of the world and not have to worry about it. So things seem to be working out although there’s still a tremendous amount to do here.

[3:40:56] Then, yesterday morning, Friday morning, I stayed at home and worked on some monetary tables here on my computer for until about 11:00, I suppose, and by that time, Linda had come with the Currellys big jeep, Toyota jeep, very nice machine which John had shown Rúhíyyih Khánum how to handle the night before. Big diesel thing and there were various levers and locking the front wheels and so on to be mastered. And Khánum and Violette were busy packing and getting over things together. And they left me mail to mail and packages to leave with Lisa Webster [ph] to have taken by pilgrim express back to the Holy Land and tickets for Lisa Webster [ph] to worry about. And she wants some more business cards for Lisa to make me. Lisa has the format for them. And she wants me to call also this fellow in Georgia who she's planning to go see and have a two or three week rest and some analysis of her trace metals and I don't know what all to try to get her health. Well, she was in pretty good shape, but she likes these periods of repose and talking to a doctor, and she wants to try this fellow out. His name is Bill Saunders [ph]. And so I suppose they got off all right. I had to go down to my office at that point. So that's all that I can think of for now, although I'm sure I'll be thinking of more things and wanting to add them. And this again is November the 6th. And it is the recollections of Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette Nakhjavani's trip to Haiti through yesterday, November the 5th.

[3:42:41] At the risk of duplication, I wanted to add a little incident. Well, not an incident, an anecdote. Rúhíyyih Khánum had been given in Miragoâne a gourd by René who bought this for her. She'd seen them and asked him to bargain for her, which cost one gourd by coincidence. And it had been carved so that there was a handle and it looked like a basket with a handle over the top. And she also had some kind of a scoop. And when we got to the hotel, in the Concord in Les Cayes, it was discovered that we had no hot water there, and she hates cold showers at least as much as I do. So she was saying with great pleasure, taking great pleasure in making use of everything that she had managed to heat or Violette had heated for her with her portable water heater. I think it's an immersion heater, she must have. Heated some water and dumped it in the gourd and mixed it with a little cool water to make warm water filling the gourd, and then used her little ladle that she had purchased to take a very pleasant warm sponge bath. And she mentioned that more than once and was very pleased with herself. On another occasion in her visit quite a lot earlier, but I don't remember exactly when, and I may be repeating myself, Khánum mentioned that she was talking about the need to refer directly to the writings on issues, and she mentioned a time when the Hands were consulting. I think this was during the period after the Guardian's passing and before the election of the House of Justice. And there was some critical issue which she didn't describe, and one of the Hands quoted verbatim a passage or a sentence or whatever from the writings that appeared to give an answer to the question at hand. And other Hands asked whether they could see the original, and she didn't mention which Hand it was but the distinguished Hand who had quoted the passage was apparently a little bit put out that they didn't have confidence in his memory or whatever it was. But they went and they looked up to passage and lo and behold, the context for the quotation made all the difference. And it turned out that although the passage apparently had applied to the problem at hand, and when they looked at the context, it did not. And apparently they had came to the opposite conclusion, which was very instructive.

[3:45:16] Now I want to put down here a couple of stories that Violette told at Rúhíyyih Khánum's suggestion just recently, and then I asked Violette later for a couple of the details and clarification so that I would get them straight. And I wrote those down, but I do wanna put them on the tape, too, in case I forget something or with time, the memory changes. These stories both centered around Muhammad Tabrízí who was the uncle of Ali Nakhjavani. And he was eight years old in 1892 and Bahá’u’lláh passed away. So he would have been somewhere between six and eight presumably when the first story took place. He was in the mansion of Bahá’u’lláh, and she wasn't sure whether it was downstairs or upstairs. Probably upstairs, she thinks, but she's not sure exactly where. Nobody seemed to be around. He was getting some candy for himself, and I think it was rock sugar candy that was being stored there. And he had filled his mouth, I think, and certainly his hands with the candy and was turning around to leave. And lo and behold, there was Bahá’u’lláh standing in the door. And of course, he was absolutely petrified. And Bahá’u’lláh came in and above where the little boy could reach on a shelf up higher, there was some [?], which is a much finer kind of sweet that was very much treasured apparently, that they had in the house. And oh, my goodness, now I'm forgetting exactly how it went. I'll have to ask her. He took some down anyway, and either he put it, I think, on the backs of this boy's hands, turned his hands around and could put a little bit on the backs of his hands. And, I guess they'd just left or something. Anyway, it's a very nice little story.

[3:47:21] Then the other story about this same young man. I don't know exactly when it took place. He was in a handwriting class given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. And they had to present their work, I don't know if it was every week or what it was, to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to have His approval. And he never got a good mark because his handwriting was really not very good. So one week, he apparently did better than usual, I don't know, and he got a mark of approval from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in the margin, I guess, next to his writing. Well, he thought, you know, "I'll never be able to do as well again. So what I'll do is I'll just rub out the mark that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá made and present the same work to Him the next time." So he managed to erase this mark of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s better than any forger and so that you couldn't possibly tell that there had been a mark there. And he stood in the line as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá came down to correct the or look at the work of the various students. And as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá approached, he began to feel more and more apprehensive. And when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá came to him, He took a glance at the work. And then He grabbed his ear and turned it, and He said, "This handwriting is terrible." And passed on without giving him a mark of approval the second time. One other thing that I wanted to put down was Khánum quoted more than twice, I think, a prayer that she said had been published in the old, old American prayer book and then had been taken out in later editions. And she regretted it. And Violette remembered the original, and so they compared notes to get it right. But the way Rúhíyyih Khánum remembered it - this is just a little piece of it, obviously - is, "Protect me from the inordinate self. It sets a new snare at every step and tempts at every breast." She keeps quoting this. It's a very important maxim.

[3:49:51] One other thing I wanted to mention, there was one evening when they were discussing some of the problems among pioneers here, little things that needed to be paid attention to. And I think Khánum mentioned something about another place or another occasion. Anyway, I got the very clear impression that the two of them work out fairly carefully on occasion exactly how they're going to approach a situation and do a little bit of sort of role playing where they set up a situation in order to make a certain point in a way that might not be too conspicuous to the people involved. And I wondered on occasion whether Khánum was consciously doing that with me on some things, or maybe sometimes it's just unconscious. But sometimes she says things and you wonder whether she's thinking about, you know, a particular flaw in your character or a particular kind of advice that she thinks that you would benefit from. But she puts it in a very indirect way so that you'll think about it later but you won't necessarily think that she's being, too, you know, you won't feel sensitive about it or whatever. And I had the distinct impression that that's what was going on the evening with the pioneers when she said that she couldn't remember what it was that she was going to discuss. And she wanted Provee [ph] to say what it was because it's better for somebody to pose a question to her than for her to launch out and that she may very well have actually remembered what it was and wanted it to come the other way. And it was very interesting that even though Provee [ph] didn't quite hit the nail on the head that Adelei North came up with this thing later about this positive thinking and the role of economic development versus spiritual objectives and all that which had so much troubled Counselor Arbab. And then he had asked Rúhíyyih Khánum please to talk about with the pioneers.

[3:52:12] This is Thursday, November 17th and take number four of my recollections, notes about Rúhíyyih Khánum's visit to Haiti. She and Violette came back from their long trip to the north early. They were expected back today and they came back Tuesday night, two nights ago. They had gone up to Hinche where, apparently the arrangements were a little bit haphazard and they had a lot of trouble with the lady who ran the little hostel who was connected somehow with the Christian Church or something or other. I don't know what exactly the problems were, but it wasn't very warm and friendly environment so they left there early, apparently, and went up to Cap-Haïtien and visited with Ed and Sue up there and had three media interviews, I believe. Or was it two? And meeting with about 50 young people from what is known as the university up there. I had some rather, what shall I say? Well, he remarked about the fact that it wasn't really much of a university. Some man is trying very hard to put the university together there. But they were very impressed with what [Hands?] had been able to to do up there despite as Rúhíyyih Khánum says their limitations and that those accomplishments speak, she says, for themselves. And then they went with George and stayed in the [?] Hotel on the coast south of Saint-Marc. Or was it south wherever it is? Yeah, south. And visited some villages near Artibonite, but apparently the one night they were at [?] was a disaster. They were charged $70. There was no hot water. The sink drain didn't connect properly and the water went all over the floor and I don't know what all. And they didn't like that at all. So they decided to go to all three villages that had been arranged in one day and then to come back here.

[3:54:15] And I got a call Tuesday just before leaving for a reception. That was a little late. It must have been about 7:30. And Violette said that they would be coming in around 9:00. So I went off to my reception at the home of the head of the French cooperation mission, [?]. There were all kinds of luminaries and ministers and ambassadors and whatnot there, and so I spent what I thought was the minimum time there and then came back. And they had just apparently gotten back. It was about 9:30. And Rúhíyyih Khánum didn't look unwell. She certainly was full of her usual life, but obviously very tired from a long day. And Violette looked more bushed. And they got themselves to bed very quickly without anything much to eat. I think they had a couple of bananas or something. Rúhíyyih Khánum wasn't interested in eating; she's just interested in sleeping. So I hadn't had a chance to really get flowers in the house or anything like that. And I had to go have a full schedule at the office on Wednesday so I just left them at the house. And it seems that Rúhíyyih Khánum spent the whole day in bed, and she'd gotten a very drippy cold and wanted to try to recover by getting a good, complete rest so I didn't see her all that day.

[3:55:33] The evening, I had dinner with Violette and Violette took a little soup and whatnot up to Khánum. Stuart had come - no, not Stuart. Arnold had come by in the morning to ask me a question about storing files on his little computer, and we took advantage of his being here. And Violette went down with him to do some shopping for vegetables because I was caught short. I had sent Leon [ph] home. I had to go to Washington on Wednesday last and came back late Sunday to take care of the problems with my business and was very tired. And I found Leon [ph], my cook had a cold so I sent her home on Monday and told her to get better and come back when she was well. And the vegetable lady, Marshan [ph], didn't come for some reason this usual weekly schedule that she comes, so there was very little in the house. Unfortunately, I had gone and done a little shopping Tuesday afternoon in anticipation of an early return by Rúhíyyih Khánum just in case because there was very little in the house but there were no fresh vegetables and things like that. But they got a, as I say, Violette got some vegetables. They went and got Farhad who knows about these things much more than Arnold, and they apparently did a little bargaining and got a few things. Made some kind of a nice spinach soup, which I had some of for dinner. And I had dinner last night with Violette.

[3:57:02] And then today, Thursday, was a holiday. We all went to bed early last night and I had a very long and sound night's sleep. I was exhausted. It was a long day. And again Khánum was in bed this morning with the same cold. And so I went down, did some shopping and tried to get some things for the reception that we're giving tomorrow night. And then Woody - George Lord is his full name - came up at about 11:30. He's a chiropractor, and he was going to do various and sundry treatments on Rúhíyyih Khánum, and they were at it for, I'd say, two hours or so. And Khánum seemed to be pleased with the effects. She wasn't raving about them, but see, she certainly didn't have anything negative to say. And she seemed to be better and was feeling good enough to come down at least for lunch at the table in her Chinese bathrobe with, it has big, maybe a foot-wide sleeves which are half sewn up at the bottom so you can put things in there. And she had some Kleenex-es and things stuffed in. It's very practical, actually. Nice kind of robe, white robe with little black spots or something like that on it. So we just had lunch and some coffee after, and a discussion. And it's now about 3:30. I guess, it's - yeah, it took her about an hour and a half or so altogether, and they've gone up for more rest. As usual, I can't remember all the things that were discussed. We covered a wide variety of subjects. One of them was marriage and Khánum has said a number of things to me twice. I'm sure she's gone over the same stories so many times that she doesn't keep track of who she said which ones to. And so some of them are now repeating that we've been together a couple of weeks, but it's always good to hear the same stories again and be sure that I have my recollection of them correct. And then there are always some new ones, too.

[3:59:16] She was talking. She frequently comes back to the subject of her parents. She was talking about her parents again and a number of things about them. And she was saying that in retrospect, years later, she realized that her parents had not taken advantage of their social position in Montreal to make friends of the Faith. We were talking about Ruhi and John Huddleston, and we got on that subject. And she said that her father's brother and his wife were in the social column every time that they had somebody over for lunch, and that there was the kind of class of society that they moved in. And that she realized that her father was very retiring person, didn't take advantage of those contacts. And her mother was bored stiff with - both of them, I guess were - with society types, and they just were never very much attracted to that. But she realized that that was really a mistake, that they should have been making friends for the Faith. She said that Montreal didn't really have a society, but what society it had, they could have reached. And she said that her father really never did anything for the Faith in the sense that one usually thinks of. It was her mother who went out and was so active as a teacher, and whatnot. Her father was very quiet. She said, for example, he certainly never gave a book about the Faith to anyone or anything like that. But of course he rendered - she didn't say this - but of course, he rendered great services and was very much loved by the Guardian. And we remarked on how the Faith has room in it for all kinds of service and we shouldn't limit in our own minds what is service to the Cause. And then she mentioned an episode when her mother, who didn't like her father smoking, went to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and asked ‘Abdu’l-Bahá if he would please tell Sutherland Maxwell not to smoke, and he smoked the pipe. And Khánum said that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá responded, "Leave him alone. He's a good man." Nice little story.

[4:01:25] And Khánum was talking about how entirely different her parents were. And we talked about Bahiyyih Nakhjavani and one thing or another, some of the same ground we've talked about before. And Khánum said again, which she says often, that she thinks it's very important that Baháʼís marry Baháʼís so that they have at least the Faith in common, and that they marry somebody of their own class, their own social standing. It's really asking a great deal if you try to bridge different social classes in marriage. We were also talking about Baháʼís being well aware of what's going on around them and handling money and things of that kind. And I mentioned that I've been talking with Woody before. He went upstairs to see her and that he was involved with one of the, hoping to get some favors from one of the ministers here who's not known to be very honest, to put it mildly. And he was surprised when I mentioned that, and Khánum said, “Well, I must remember when I talk with the pioneers again to talk about being suspicious.” And she told me again if the story that I've already mentioned, I think, before how she had mentioned to the Guardian that he was very suspicious once and he said, "You think I'm suspicious? ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was suspicious." And Khánum went on, not quoting directly from the Guardian that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had spies that reported to him on the activities of the Covenant-breakers and was always aware of what was going on, what was really going on. And she said we mustn't confuse that with other spiritual qualities, being aware of the forgiveness of God or whatever it might be.

[4:03:21] She also told again the story about how her father had pulled her mother aside at one point and sat down with her or something and said that he thought they were drifting apart, that she was so active in her Baháʼí affairs and he was getting more and more involved with his friends and his club and whatnot and his profession, and that they were drifting apart and that her mother was seized with fear because she really loved her husband very much and didn't want to lose him in any way. But she said, "You know, when we married, I told you that the Faith would always come first and that if I have to, I will proceed alone in-" I don't know exactly how she put it but "in my services" or something like that. And Sutherland reached over and took May's hand and said, "I'll go with you all the way." And her mother apparently felt that that was a turning point for him in his relations to the Faith and his becoming a Baháʼí. We also talked at lunch about some of the individual Baháʼís in this community. And Khánum is always thinking - it's very impressive to me - about the welfare and the needs of each individual Baháʼí, particularly those that are doing worthy services for the Faith and trying as best she can to help him. And one of the many ways in which she does that is to disperse from time to time some funds that she has control over, apparently have been made available to her to use in worthy ways. And sometimes she gives the money directly to people when they need some help and sometimes she feels it's better not to let them know where it's coming from and make some indirect arrangement. And she likes to do this confidentially, so I won't mention who she was helping or how much, but it's very beautiful to me to see how very concerned she is about each individual Baháʼí.

[4:05:17] Another thing she was just saying, I don't remember how the subject came up, but she said, "You know, it's very sad to me," she said, "whenever I think about it, think back about how sad it is - " she used that word several times - "that the Guardian had no intellectual companionship." She said that Bahá’u’lláh had ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had Bahá’u’lláh, and presumably they had some kind of an intellectual relationship, she said, in addition to their spiritual relationship or whatever else. There was some meeting of minds. And she said it was very sad to her how the Guardian, with this very, very fine mind that he had, had no one that he could have an intellectual interchange with. She said he would, he could push and there was no there was nobody pushing back, you know, there was no resistance. And she described the people who would be around the table, Millie Collins, she said, who had the big flop of blonde hair on her head. And whenever Shoghi Effendi talked, she would scrunch up her face - Khánum scrunched up her face to show how that would look - in concentration to catch his every word. And she mentioned the other people, Sylvia Ioas who was a little feathery, she said, lightweight and the other old people and whatnot, people, nobody in their prime and with the kind of mind that could challenge him and respond to Shoghi Effendi. And she felt that was very, very sad, that ever since the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, he had nobody to communicate with on that level.

[4:06:02] I don't remember how that came up. We were talking about this question of making friends for the Faith and how boring usually the socialite people are, or at least her parents thought so. And I said that among the diplomats and people like that here in Haiti, some of them are terribly boring, but some of them are very interesting people. Then she responded with this remark about the Guardian. She is working on materials for a book about her family and I'd asked her about it because Roger had told me that she'd asked him for materials. And she said yes, she'd asked him for any letters and things that might bear. And she said that, who was it? Nell? I don't know. Nell Golden or who that is. Anyway, whoever is working with her in the Holy Land has been going through all of the Maxwell papers. Khánum said that since '52, I guess which is when they must have moved to the, what happened? Maybe that was when her father died? Anyway, she has the papers since then and hasn't had a chance to look at them and now is organizing them by date and subjects and whatnot and trying to get a chronology, which she says is essential to writing an autobiography. You have to have at least the dates and the framework, you know, the bones on which you hang the stories and so forth that you have. Otherwise, you have nothing for a biography. Well, that's all I can think of at the moment. And that brings us up to this afternoon, 17th of November, Thursday afternoon. Sorry, it's the 18th. And I just thought of something else. Khánum started to laugh, and I don't remember how this came up, but she started talking about Ali and she said, you know, he has this very frustrating but funny characteristic, so very pronounced in him. She said, "I don't know how well you know Ali, but let me tell you about this." Apparently, she said, when you say something to him, it's like dropping a pebble in a bottomless well; you never hear it splash. He doesn't give any kind of reaction. And Violette chimed in and said, you know, sometimes when Bahiyyih is talking with him on the phone, she'll say, "Daddy, Daddy, are you there?" because he doesn't even give any kind of reaction. And Khánum said it's like a camel with five stomachs, you know. It takes a long time. Whatever you said goes through this long process, apparently, down there. And she said, when it does come back, it comes back with interest as she put it. You get more than your money's worth. He's had time to digest it, but you're not going to get anything right away. She said that it come up because Violette had dreamed about him last night, and they were apparently talking about her dream and that it reminded her of him, brought him close, she said. So this again is Thursday afternoon November 18th.

[4:09:56] This is now 10:15 in the evening of the same day, Thursday, the 18th of November. As I mentioned before, Khánum went up for a rest. And I was beginning to wake up a little bit. I was very sleepy earlier in the day, and very lazy feeling and wondering if I was going to get sick or something, but it was just a need for some break, a respite from the pace. And so I got in my car and went up the mountain and had a wonderful walk up in the hills, looking at old wildflowers and just enjoying the sunset and so on. And then after a nice warm bath, arrived out of the, I mean, in the house and time to have Khánum and Violette come down. And Khánum was still wearing the same Chinese bathrobe. And we had a very pleasant dinner. And there were several things that she said this evening that were very interesting just before dinner. She had asked earlier about the IMF and the World Bank and what their difference was, and I'd explained a little bit about the differences. And she had mentioned again this evening that she had taken a course at McGill in 1931, I think she said, on public finance. And she mentioned again that she had learned at least the principle of supply and demand and that it helped her keep her own ego in check when she realized that being of limited supply, she mustn't think of herself as being of intrinsically great value. And then we were talking about, I don't remember, something to do with finance, and she said she didn't agree with the way the American National Assembly handles its finances, always having grandiose plans. And she said that she was present at every step when the Guardian developed the Ten Year Crusade. And the way that he did that was to very carefully calculate the amount of capital that he had, accumulated assets from the [?], she said that's primarily the source of revenues. And then he estimated very carefully the revenues that he expected over the 10 years of the Crusade. And then he calculated the estimated expenses of the houses of worship that were to be built. And he came out, she said, with a figure that was at least two-thirds, that was two-thirds covered, in other words, from these calculations. And one-thirds he left to what God would do, in other words. And that was the general rule of thumb, as best she remembers it, she said.

[4:12:38] She had turned down a dinner invitation from the Currellys because she still was not feeling entirely up to snuff, but she suggested that they might want to come up after dinner for a little while. So they came up just as we were finishing our dessert, and we sat around the table for a little while and then went over and sat around in the more comfortable chairs. And they got into the subject of health. She was asking why they have the house sprayed, and John was describing the kind of spray they used and that he didn't think it was too bad for the health and certainly reduced the danger of malaria and particularly dengue fever. And they said that Alice, their little daughter, had had 62 bites, I think, on her arm at one time, all infected. And they talked about that, and I got a call from Carrie [ph] and another call and was out of the conversation for a while. But Khánum was saying a number of things that she had, she was third generation homeopathic, you know, people subscribing to homeopathic remedies. She said it was founded in Germany at a time before modern medicine, when they still used leeches and didn't know that diseases were communicable and things like that. A very simple idea that basically, she said that a small amount of something can protect you from the symptoms of a larger amount, and that symptoms of various poisons and so on were studied and that very tiny amounts would be administered as remedies and down to the millionth doses for some things. And she said that Bahíyyih had a little kit of these things, and had become pretty proficient in treating minor ailments of her daughter, things like stomach ache and whatnot.

[4:14:33] And she said that, for example, they were in London, and then she said they had their ticket, she and the Guardian, the ticket back to the Holy Land. And she said good night to the Guardian. And the next morning she came in and he was sitting looking perfectly natural in his bed with his eyes open, and she thought he had just woken up. And then she said that she had discovered that he was dead. And she called the doctor right away and apparently it was a homeopathic doctor because she said that he came and saw that she was about ready to go off the deep end and lose her mind, and he gave her a millionth dose of something or other. She mentioned the name but I don't remember. And it brought her down and she collected, was able to collect herself. And he gave her this bottle, and he said, "If you ever get that way again and feel that you're about to go off the edge of sanity, take this remedy." And she said one at a time after the passing of the Guardian, she got hysterical or was losing her sensibilities and again took this remedy, and it brought her back. We were talking at quite some length about Ed and Sue up in Cap and the problems they have with their, with not getting permission from her parents to get married, and the services that they're doing and how fine they are as Baháʼís. And Khánum talked about that at length because Deb is close to Sue, and she felt that any advice she might have could be transmitted that way because when they were up there, apparently the subject of their personal lives and their situation was never raised. And Khánum didn't want to intrude, but she seemed to have the feeling that if they really are very serious about each other, that Sue could be trying perhaps a little bit more, writing letters patiently and lovingly to her parents and doing something and that realistically, she may not have many other options since she's getting older.

[4:16:30] And then we talked a little bit about Ed and his hope to start a business and various ideas about being in the import-export business whatnot and John said, something I don't know, sort of in the middle of the road and Khánum said, "Now listen, John, let's talk directly about this. When he - " and she pointed to me, "leaves this country, you - " and later, she added Deb, "are going to be about all the common sense and good judgment left in the Baháʼí community in this country.” And she said, "Well, there is Michael, a minister in Cayes, but he's far away. And Moro also has a good head on his shoulders. but he's in Jacmel." And really here in the city, which she called the hub of the community. really, it's more or less John. And the other Baháʼís, of course, have good quality. She talked about Linda and her fine ability of teaching and so on, but not very good at organizing and good judgment. And so she said that John had the responsibility to give good advice and to, you know, to think clearly about things. It's not exactly the way she put it, but that was the idea. And John said something about how maybe they could find a way around the Baháʼí law requiring consent. And Khánum went into quite a long explanation of the law, that it's absolute, that it applies to natural parents and that there's absolutely no exception. Of course, you can't find your natural parent, then you use the whatever the law of the land is about somebody being legally dead. But that's the idea. And even adoptive parents or legitimate children and whatever have to find the natural parents at that period if they're alive. And Violette mentioned the case of Sali Nunu [ph] who was a Jewish background, and his parents said that he could not marry a Baháʼí, period. And he wrote to the Guardian, and he said that their position was based entirely on prejudice. It had nothing to do with any particular person, but it was prejudice against the Faith, the Baháʼí Faith, and couldn't there be some exception made. And the Guardian wrote back - and we have this in writing - and he said that marriage is not obligatory, but consent of parents is, period.

[4:18:55] Let me talk to some things about the pilgrimage. John and Deb had written and then somehow hadn't gotten an answer or something. And the same was true of apparently David Hadden's son, somebody with the name Hadden. I think it’s their son. And so Violette had written and it seems to have been the letter that I took and posted for her when I went up to Washington. And somehow it got there very fast and a telex came back, I think on Tuesday for Violette from Ali, very short that said that they have been given a date in the middle of January. And so the Currellys are all, their whole family is going, and they were interested about advice about being in the Holy Land and how cold it's going to be and what they can do, and so on. And Khánum mentioned among other things that there are evening programs except on Saturday night, the pilgrimage is always starting on Monday night, and that every year in the circular newsletter for World Center staff, the House reminds to staff that pilgrimage is for pilgrimage and not for socializing, and that they cannot offer hospitality in any way that would interfere with the schedule of the pilgrims. So in, except for Saturday night, if someone invites you to dinner, for instance, and they're a staff member, they're supposed to discharge you by eight o'clock. And what you do with your time is up to you, but you're supposed to be out of the home of the staff member by 8:00 so you can at least go to the program that's been arranged for you at the pilgrim house if you want.

[4:20:42] Khánum was also talking at dinner about the radio interviews she'd had in Cap-Haïtien. And one place described, and I said that I could imagine it and she said, "No, you can't." And she said it was a very tiny, little dark, dingy place, and all equipment stuffed in there and two chairs, and they sat there, and all kinds of background noises and so on. But, she said, it was very inexpensive. She didn't remember exactly the figures, but Eddie [ph] told her, for renting radio time, and she felt very strongly that the Baháʼís should be taking advantage of this opportunity, particularly in Cap-Haïtien. And then we reach that whole area. She felt that would be a very fertile area for this kind of thing. And she mentioned a number of things. She said that her impression was that there were different dialects from different areas of the country, and the program should be in the, spoken by somebody from that area so that they would be most understood. And she said, maybe the Baháʼís could rent several hours of time and eventually have their own little station and could have public service announcements, messages and things like that, from one people, one person to another, and some Baháʼí programs and then some music. She thought maybe Paul Robeson or who-knows-what could be interesting music for these people. And she said it's important not to have programs that would antagonize the other religions and stir up opposition.

[4:22:18] I told her a little bit about the work that had been done and where it stands and the contribution Atlanta had made and so on, and a little administrative problems that we've been having getting it going. They both, Khánum and Violette, said that the Guardians had several times, the main thing is to get something out to the people, not to get all bundled up in administrative questions and so on, and that it can always be improved later. It doesn't have to be perfect the first time. And Rúhíyyih Khánum said more than once, said Baháʼís are always trying to get to the end in the beginning. And she liked the idea of this little mimeographed book that had been stapled together of prayers that she had seen. And I said that was exactly what is being done now, and she said she was going to write to the counselors and she's going to talk to the National Assembly and she's going to come down on everybody about this. They need to be doing more teaching and they need to go ahead with these things. I told her this was, these were all goals of the plan. I described the cassette we'd made and the beginnings that have been made and that there are very clear goals and that maybe she could mention something more about it meeting with pioneers that would help to give people some enthusiasm and impetus for the work. Well, that's all I remember right now. I'm sure there was something else, but I sure hope it will occur to me later so I can put it down while I remember it. Now this again is the evening of Thursday, the 18th of November.

[4:23:44] This is now a Sunday evening, the 21st of November, bed time. And I'm as usual completely filled up and also tired. And I'm sure I will not be able to remember half of the things that have transpired this evening, but I want to try to put as many of them down as possible quickly while they're fresh in my memory. This evening we had for dinner Michael Bannister, pioneer in Cayes and forester who Rúhíyyih Khánum decided to invite just this morning when we were at the center for almost all day long, institute. I'll try to go back and mention some things about the events of the last few days. But anyway, this was arranged essentially on the spur of the moment. And he arrived for dinner and was very lowkey. And he's not the kind of person who would force himself, push himself forward in the presence of Rúhíyyih Khánum so it was all rather quiet. And there were even lulls in the conversation and so forth. And at one moment during dinner, Rúhíyyih Khánum said something just sort of wistfully to herself, "You know, there are so many interesting things in the world." I was just thinking earlier about how much I've been learning from her, and one of the things is the love and appreciation of all of the beauty and diversity in the world, how extraordinary it is and how much joy one can take in all of that variety and all the wonder of it and forget the many problems and difficulties by focusing on the magnificence of God's creation. And she certainly does that to the nth degree. It's a great lesson, in people as well as objects and animals and flowers and all kinds of things. And I don't know where to begin. After dinner, we sat around, again in the living room. And they talked about one thing or another. They, both Khánum and Violette talked about their trip to India and the seeing a lady cremated in menorahs, the Ganges and so on.

[4:26:05] And then later we got into reminiscences about Baháʼí history, and it's extraordinary. Suddenly there was a whole series of memorable stories. Khánum talked about her mother. I think it was ‘Abdu’l-Bahá who'd said - no, Shoghi Effendi. I didn't catch that. Anyway, that her mother had been chosen because she was the weakest instrument in all of France, and was chosen to demonstrate the power of the Faith because she was tiny, she was ill. She was dependent on her mother for support, nothing in the way of worldly power or influence. And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had told her to stay in Paris, and her mother annually closed up the apartment and went to the seaside and expected, of course, that May would go with her. But this time because ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had said that she should stay in Paris, she refused, and her mother was flabbergasted and couldn't understand such impertinence. Khánum said that her grandmother was a worldly lady and she thought anyway that her invalid daughter should get the fresh air of the sea, but May refused so her mother closed up the apartment anyway. And May apparently was taken in by one of the Baháʼís. And it was shortly after that Breakwell came to a meeting and was taught the Faith by May Bolles. And after that, which I guess was a couple of weeks later or something, she got a Tablet apparently for communication from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá saying that she was permitted to leave Paris to join her mother. And Khánum said that the first communication that Breakwell sent to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was a cable, I guess. And in this cable, he asked for forgiveness. And it seemed strange to her but it turned out that Breakwell had some factories in the U.S. South. He was a Britisher. And in those factories, there was child labor, apparently. And when he became a Baháʼí, he was struck by the injustice of that and he asked ‘Abdu’l-Bahá for forgiveness.

[4:28:11] There was another, later apparently, Breakwell was - I don't know if he's visiting in Montreal or where this took place. He and May were riding in a what Khánum assumes was a horse-drawn streetcar. And they were going up a little hill and Breakwell said, "Excuse me, I'll join you later." And he jumped out of the car and May turned and watched to see what he did, where he was going and he went. And there was a lady who was struggling to push a cart or something like that up the hill, and Breakwell very quietly went over next to her and helped her push her load up the hill. Khánum wanted to illustrate faithfulness, and she said that once in a meeting, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá picked up a black book and he turned to Lua Getsinger and He asked her what color it was, and she said, "It is black, my lord." And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said, "No, it is white." Then Lua said, "It is white, my Lord." And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá turned to the others and said that is obedience or something like that. She also mentioned another time when they were traveling. I think they were taking a ride in Central Park, and Lua got a speck of sand or something in her eye and was fussing with a little bit. And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá asked her what was wrong. and she said she had something in her eye. And so He pulled the bottom, her bottom lid down and he licked his finger and ran it across her eye to take out the sand, and immediately she reached over and pulled down the lower lid of her other eye, as much as to say, you know, if you're going to do that wonderful thing with one eye, you must do it to the other one, too.

[4:29:51] And I think it was Violette who was quoting from the diary of Youness Khan when he was secretary to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Lua Getsinger was backing out of the room. I think it may have been in Egypt. Anyway, it was the last, her last visit at that time with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and she was being sent out into the world. And Youness Khan writes that suddenly she was enveloped in light and was just radiant or something very, very impressive impression. And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá turned to him and saw that he was moved and said, "Ah, so you have seen it, too." He said, and he said, unfortunately - I'm obviously paraphrasing - it won't last in the world. When she goes out into the world, whatever it was that she had acquired from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá would not last. And Violette said that Youness Khan was nine years the secretary of the Guardian - of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá - and when the Guardian saw his diary, he remarked in the presence of one of the very reliable Baháʼís, she thought it might have been Dr. Furútan, that this diary was as valuable as Nabil's narrative. Michael asked whether there was a recording of Shoghi Effendi. And Rúhíyyih Khánum explained the same answers before. And it was Marguerite Sears who had set up a tape recorder and asked to record a message for the African Baháʼís. And the Guardian hesitated and then said, "No, it is not necessary." And Khánum said that she and Lutfullah Hakeem had several times talked about sneaking the recorder into the shrine to record Shoghi Effendi's beautiful chanting in the shrines. But of course, nobody dared to do such an audacious thing, and she said everybody was afraid of the Guardian.

[4:31:51] But another time this evening, she said, it's amazing the things that came out, extraordinary. She said that, what was it, somebody had said to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that He was kind. And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said, "You think I'm kind? Bahá’u’lláh was - " oh, no, I know. It was ‘Abdu’l-Bahá's son - daughter, excuse me, who had said somebody had mentioned ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was kind. And she said, "You think out ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was kind. It was Bahá’u’lláh that was kind." It's a quality Rúhíyyih Khánum said that we don't usually think about or associate with the manifestation of God because we're so much in awe of Him and of His station. I don't remember if that was before or after, but I asked Violette to tell again the story about Muhammad Tabrízí because I wanted to be sure to get the details right. And what she said is that it was in the afternoon. It was hot so that everybody was sleeping, and Muhammad thought that he could get away with getting some sweets. So he went into the store room and he filled up his mouth with this candy and also both of his hands. And then, as he turned to leave. He saw Bahá’u’lláh there, and she explained that in those days it was very unusual to be received into the presence of Bahá’u’lláh, even for those who, or particularly perhaps, for those who are living there. He apparently received the pilgrims but it would be very rare and a great honor to be brought into His presence if you were living in the household, and the children were brought up to understand the station of Bahá’u’lláh. So you can imagine it would be a tremendous shock, you know? And Bahá’u’lláh asked Muhammad. He said, "What are you doing?" But Muhammad’s mouth was too full of candy and he couldn't answer. He couldn't say anything. So Bahá’u’lláh took him by the hair and turned him around by his hair and led him back apparently to where the candies were. And then He took down this better candy that was up higher. It was [?], I think. I wrote it down. And put some on his fists. His fists were upright but full, and so He put the piece apparently on each fist and then pushed Him out of the room or let him out of the room or whatever. Muhammad Tabrízí was the first son of a couple, Violette explained, when the exiles all arrived in the prison of 'Akká. Two of them died and they were having great hardships. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá asked permission of Bahá’u’lláh to arrange some marriages to lighten the atmosphere. And five couples were married at that time, and one of those couples was the parents of Muhammad Tabrízí and apparently at least a brother. And he was born, actually - his parents were married in the fortress, and he was born in the fortress. Khánum said it's the proper translation of the word that Violette used for where he was born. And Khánum said she didn't realize that that was the case.

[4:34:47] There was another story which is very long and evolved that Muhammad Tabrízí used to tell. Apparently, he was a good storyteller. He had a little, I don't know, stall in the bazaar or something in 'Akká during the time of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. And he was known to be trustworthy, and one of the Baháʼís came to him one day and gave him a sum of money for safekeeping. And about a week or so later, the man came and took the money back again, or sometime later he did. And then not too long after that, the man came again and asked for the same money again. And Muhammad Tabrízí said, "But I've given it to you already." And the man said, "No, you haven't." And Tabrízí said, yes, he had. And so the man went away angry and apparently he went to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and he complained to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that Muhammad had stolen his money. So the next Wednesday, Wednesdays was the day when the ladies were received by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and all the ladies were there. And Muhammad's mother was a very devout older woman at that time, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá turned to her and he said to her, "You must tell your son when you go home that he should go tomorrow morning early at dawn to the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh and pray for forgiveness. So the lady went home, and Violette said that she was tearing her hair, and wailing and asking her son, "What have you done that would cause ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to ask you such a thing?" And he wouldn't tell her. He wouldn't say anything. The next morning he went obediently. He walked from 'Akká to Bahjí and entered the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh and prayed for forgiveness. And then, apparently, I think it was two weeks later, I'm not quite sure, he got a message. There was a feast, I guess coming up in Haifa, and he got a message from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that he should come to the Shrine of the Báb early in the morning again at dawn the next day. And so he was, of course, concerned about being summoned by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wasn't a major thing, you know. And he went there to the, and there was nobody there except ‘Abdu’l-Bahá who asked him, "What is this that went between you and this other man?" And Muhammad said, "With your permission, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, let me tell you a story which you told us at an earlier time." And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said, "Yes, please." Gave permission. So Muhammad began then to tell this story which--

[4:37:14] This again is late Sunday evening, the 21st of November. And I'm describing a few things that happened this evening. And then I have to go back and pick up from Thursday afternoon last. I was telling the story Muhammad Tabrízí was repeating back again to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá told at an earlier time, and the story was that a wealthy pilgrim had come to - or I don't know if it was a pilgrim or an exile, but he'd come from Iran to Baghad at the time when Bahá’u’lláh was living in Baghdad. And he was a jeweler, and he brought a whole bag of jewels. It was his trade. He was going to sell them or something, I suppose. And in those days, Bahá’u’lláh would assign the new arrivals to the homes of various Baháʼís to stay with, and they assigned this man to the home of an older Baháʼí who was known for being trustworthy. So the men came to this man's house and left his bag of jewels there, and a day or two passed, and he came back from wherever he was and he found the jewels were gone. So he was extremely upset and alarmed, and he went directly to Bahá’u’lláh and complained. So in the presence of a whole gathering of Baháʼís, Bahá’u’lláh turned to this old man and He - oh no, I'm forgetting quite thedetails, but He berated him or something publicly, among all the other Baháʼís and said that he had to make it up or to find, to go and find the jewels. That's what it was, make it up to this man. So this old Baháʼí was known for his trustworthiness, didn't say anything. And he left the gathering and he began right away to work as a porter carrying heavy loads or something and saving a little pittance. And he began every day to give whatever he was able to save to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá for safekeeping towards this obligation of his, but it would have taken him lifetimes to make up the total sum.

[4:39:14] And many, well not many, but some of the believers were shocked because they knew the man was trustworthy and they thought this was a miscarriage of justice. And some of the people even left the Faith because they were so shocked by this treatment that Bahá’u’lláh had given to this man. So then, after everybody had left, Bahá’u’lláh turned to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and He instructed Him apparently, if I remember the details right, to go and talk to certain authorities and complain and ask them to try to apprehend the thief. So I guess a week or some days later, the authorities did their work and the thief was, in fact, apprehended. And then again in a large gathering of the Baháʼís, this was, I guess, mentioned. And I guess the jewels were recovered and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá turned to this man and he said that you have been created to serve as a test for the Faith of the sincerity of the love towards God of the believers. No, not quite getting all the details right but that was the general idea. So that was all that Muhammad Tabrízí said. He didn't try to defend himself or anything. He just quoted back to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá the story that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had told at an earlier time. And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá understood what he was saying, and He put His hands on each side of Muhammad's face and kissed him on the mouth. And then He put His arm apparently on Tabrízí's shoulder and sent him off. And what did He say? Anyway, He was - oh, He leaned back and laughed, I guess, before that and He was very much taken with that story and understood, of course, that Tabrízí was not at fault.

[4:41:00] Khánum was talking tonight, among many other things about pets and all kinds of different things and the subject of parrots. And she talked about some people on the Green Light Expedition or somewhere in that Expedition that she'd met villagers who had all six, I think she said, parrots living in their house. Then she talked about this large, it's not a parrot. It's a - oh, I'm terrible with the things - Macaw or something, a large bird with a big beak that she says is very cuddly, and she recommended that to Michael as a pet. These people had one up high and they'd call it and it would come down and they'd cuddle it and said they'd had another parrot that would go to sleep in the corner and whatnot. And then she told about she had a parrot that she bought from a fellow she thought was a Nazi, a German man in Barranquilla in Colombia. And she was gonna take it on her way, I guess, back to the World Centre, eventually or something. And one of the Baháʼís have given her a little, little basket that looked like a binocular’s case with cover that closed and she had the parrot in that. She was getting on the plane in Barranquilla. And not long before, a plane had been hijacked from there to Cuba. So they were strict on security, and there was an armed guard at the top of the stairs getting onto the airplane. And before she could say or do anything, this man saw this case and said "what's in that" and grabbed it and opened it and stuck his hand in and the parrot bit his finger. And he pulled his finger out an alarm, and she said "excuse me, but that's my parrot" in Spanish or something like that. And he was so surprised, you know, that he let her go without another word, but it's very funny. We all laughed a lot at that story.

[4:42:38] She talked at length about all the snakes and lizards and all the different features that she's collected, half the names I didn't even recognize. And she mentioned again in which she has before that Mason Remey was an old friend of the family. Apparently her mother taught him in Paris, and he was visiting or something and saw her when she was born, even before her mother saw her. He was there at the time and visited the hospital or whatever it was, I don't know. And so she said she'd known him a long, long time. And once he came to visit in Montreal and he came into her room, he said, "Mary, would you please do me the favor of taking your white rat out of the bathtub so that I could have a bath?" [laughs] Apparently, she had all kinds of creatures in this house of hers. She was talking about a chameleon that she'd gotten. She wasn't sure if it was at a carnival or at a pet store, and it'd come with a little chain, a little pin on it. And she'd unchained it and it had gotten loose somehow in the house. And somebody, I don't remember now who, had gone into the room and tried to turn on the light and had a pull chain, and he pulled instead on the tail of the chameleon who had been sitting there sleeping or whatever. And whoever it was said, started yelling, you know, [laughs] wondering what on earth this thing was that he'd gotten hold off. Well, it's late, and I don't want to go on too long this evening, but I tried to fill in the bones of what's happened the last few days. On Friday, we gave a reception fireside, some kind of meeting. In the evening, which was mostly the guests of Moro and Paule, it was their idea, but I also invited John Barelebon [ph] and Ingrid, whatever her name is, my neighbor here who came. And Linda brought Rani [ph] , and Michlin [ph] - no Michlin didn't come. We tried to keep it to a modest number. Adelei came and brought Gary and Miherlisad [ph]. And there was a guy named Eve Champagn [ph] who I don't know who he was, and any neighbor down the road who is one of the people who run the [?] restaurant, Lebanese people. She brought a beautiful chocolate, what is it? Marquise chocolate.

[4:45:18] And I was trying out my catering service and so on for the reception that's taking place tomorrow night with the ambassadors and ministers and whatnot. So it was a little bit on the fancy side. Beautiful spread, and everything worked very well. I was pleased. I was very busy the whole day trying to get it all put together and meeting in the afternoon with the Minister of Finance. Oh, yes, we had lunch with the Canadian Ambassador [?], and it was a little bit rushed to the end because I had a, had had a meeting scheduled with the Minister for 10:00 and he postponed it to 2:00. That was right in the middle of lunch, so he was kind enough to make it 3:00. This was to introduce and discuss the mission of Carlos Aguirre, fiscal expert. So we had to terminate by in time for me to get my appointment, and Khánum and Violette were kind enough to go down in my car all the way into town to leave me off there so I could be on time and then return to the house. And then Oragean [ph] had to go and get some tables. And then I had to go with him up and down the mountain, carrying pieces of tables and all the food and all this kind of thing. They worked very well. I was tired earlier in the day but I was beginning to feel buoyant about the, since everything was working out nicely, about the teaching opportunity of the evening, and it went very, very well. It was a wonderful occasion, very relaxed, and Khánum was teaching indirectly, which she thinks is important with this kind of people. And Moro got everybody after dinner, we got all in a circle, and Moro sort of acted as chairman and gave her an opening to talk about the Faith. He said that it's time everybody's come to hear her. "What would you like to say?" And she said, "About what?" And she said, "Well, maybe about the Baháʼí Faith, why you came to Haiti." And she very purposely, she told me later, it was quite intentional, was steered away from that and talked about qualities that she has seen in the Haitian people that struck her. A certain, she mentioned a certain lack of confidence. And this caused other people to think about qualities in the Haitian people, and the discussion ensued. And it was very warm, and this kind of approach is attractive to people. Maybe I can say some more about that evening later.

[4:47:17] Then on Saturday, Moro and Paule had come into town with a duck that they had been marinating and wanted to cook for Rúhíyyih Khánum. And it was a not too subtle way of saying that they wanted to have more time with her, and they kept asking me what they should do with it. And I, you know, I couldn't say what she wanted to do, so finally they called her themselves Saturday morning and she said go ahead, come on and cook the thing and come for dinner, you know, and serve it. So they showed up Saturday morning. And I had to go out and get some papers downtown at the bank for the drawing that's supposed to take place, and I have to authorize it by tomorrow. So Sano [ph] hadn't gotten these things to me on Friday, so I had to go into the office and get them. And there was something else I had to do, too. I don't remember. Anyway, I was gone a couple of hours - oh, shopping, that's right. And I think during that time, Woody came up and gave another treatment to Khánum. I wasn't, I didn't see him, but I know that he came a second time, and she was impressed with the variety of things that he had studied. So Paule and Moro were busy in the kitchen and Leon [ph] was down with me in Pétion-Ville shopping and Dioso [ph] was not well, and I took him down to get some medicines. And then when we got back, I came back as quickly as possible because we all went up together in my car for lunch up at the Baptist mission. It was a beautiful day. I had a very nice trip up there. Did some more shopping, and Rúhíyyih Khánum bought all kinds of little things. And this evening she mentioned that she'd gotten boxes for, these little bone boxes for all the members of the House of Justice and some other little thing for the members of the International Teaching Center. She doesn't always, she said, but she likes to, when she can, get some little thing that she thinks the people would like on her trips.

[4:49:00] We had a very nice, as I say, trip up there and I saw Aaron Williams of USAID and he was interested to know more about the Faith and talked to him about it and introduced him to Rúhíyyih Khánum, and saw my next door neighbors. And quite a few people go up on the weekend out there. It's quite crowded. And then we came back as quickly as possible because she had a radio interview at 4:00 on La Radio Nationale and Moro was kind enough to take her down for that. And I had a little bit of time. What would I do? Oh, I was tired. Yes. So I did a few relaxing things, reading the paper and so on. And then I had a nice nap. Slept rather soundly for about an hour. I was asleep when they came back. And then we had dinner with Moro and Paule that evening and the marinated duck. And then at 7:30 the pioneers all arrived and we had the evening with the pioneers, and that's tape recorded, although for some reason the tape wasn't good and my copy didn't come out very clearly, but I won't try to comment on that. It was a very rich evening. And then today Sunday, we got going a little bit on the late side. She was supposed to be at the Center at 10:00 and we got there about 10:40 or so for this institute, which was to go all day essentially or until the mid afternoon. And she gave a long talk at the Center in the morning and then met with the National Assembly during lunch, which consisted of a sandwich. And then afterwards, about 2:00 or 2:15 I guess they finished. And we had another meeting mostly to answer questions. Very nice. Nobody wanted to go home. Went on for quite some time and ended with George telling them in Creole the contents of the cable that Rúhíyyih Khánum had received yesterday about the persecutions increasing suddenly again in Iran. And that was followed by a long prayers and a very nice, close, spiritual atmosphere. And then we went home.

[4:51:11] We had had before lunch had many pictures taken. I was helping to take pictures first of everybody and then various families with Rúhíyyih Khánum and she was very pleased to give people that privilege. On the way down to that meeting, in the car, she said a couple of things that struck me that were interesting. I don't remember how we got on the subject, but she said there were terrible problems with the Persian students. I think we're talking maybe about Farhad and how much he had developed, she felt, and Michlin [ph] also, both of them in the time since they were here almost two years ago. And she said, you know, these Persian students were terrible Baháʼí students, were terrible in Switzerland and a whole lot of them, 20 plus of them were thrown in jail once for some kind of misbehavior. And it was so bad that the Guardian, she said, had trouble getting his [?] lengthened. Apparently, they were accustomed to staying in Switzerland for four months in the summertime, and the visa was, or the [?], was three months and had to be extended. And there was one time, she would call until they made a fuss, and she had to explain at some length who he was and so on. They, of course, agreed eventually but she was mentioning that. She also mentioned, she asked me if she'd told me this before and I said no because she said she doesn't remember who she told what to with all these travels. But she said the reason that she's traveling so much and has been was what the Guardian had said to her once a couple of years before he passed away. He turned to her out of the blue one day during the day, during working, I guess, for some time and said and asked her what she would do after his passing. And she said she was shocked and almost went hysterical and said, "Don't talk about such a thing, Shoghi Effendi." And then he said - I think I've got this quote straight but it might be quite not exactly right. He said, "I suppose you will travel and encourage the friends." And that's all he said. And then he went, went away. He went about his business and she eventually, you know, passed and she didn't think about it much more after that. But after he passed away, she remembered that one little statement of his and that's why she has devoted so much time to traveling.

[4:53:19] During the meeting today, she quoted a story of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá's, which is on Violette's tape, but I didn't make a tape. This was in French. We were talking about miracles. Somebody had, I don't remember how the subject come up, somebody in the back had said that couldn't compare Bahá’u’lláh to Christ because He hadn't been resurrected. And so Violette was talking about miracles and Rúhíyyih Khánum also. And she's used the story of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on this subject. She said a man was sick and the doctor came and was treating him but the man wasn't getting any better. So he asked the doctor, "Are you a good doctor?" And the doctor said yes, and to demonstrate, he started flying around the room. All over the place, wonderful flying here and there. And the man said, "That's wonderful. It's very impressive that you're flying, but I'm still not feeling any better." And the point was that the Faith does many things in a practical level and miracles really aren't of any great use, certainly not even persuasive to the people who see them, much less people who haven't seen them. And then this evening, of course, I mentioned we got home, I guess about 5:00 and after a rest, I had a few minutes finally to look at these figures that I got yesterday from Xenon [ph], found a few things awry and called him to tell him that he had to answer a few more questions tomorrow before I could authorize this drawing. And I felt much better having that question taken care of. And then, of course, Michael Bannister arrived and we were talking a little bit about the computer system that he's interested in buying and I was showing him mine. And then about 7:00, Khánum came down for supper and we had this very remarkable evening.

[4:55:08] This morning, I got an early start. And Don Davis and Nancy Songer had called me during dinner just before dessert last night, and things were rushed because it was getting short, time was short before all the pioneers would arrive. And here I was the host of the dinner, and they seemed taken aback that I couldn't talk with him just right then. And I was right in the middle of the kitchen and whatnot. And I said, "No, absolutely not." And my goodness, you know, it's hard for them to understand. And so they agreed to call later, and in the middle of the meeting, I had to get up and take this call of theirs and talk about the arrangements for the house and the business and so on. There are a couple of points I wanted to pursue so I called him again this morning and then went down and got some glasses and forks for the reception tomorrow and then waited around for some time before Khánum was ready to go to the meeting. So it's been a very, very full few days. I don't remember any longer what happened Thursday night. I'm not sure if Khánum was still ill that night, but I can't think of anything so it must not have been very much. I really feel now many things, among them very much assisted to somehow I've gotten through these very intense days, and there's so many things happening at once: this crisis with my business, and having to rush up to Washington. Very, very tiring weekend, and both Khánum and Violette remarked on how tired I looked when they got back. And there hasn't been a single break. I was hoping for - well, there was one weekend when I had little rest, but it's been very intense continuously for quite a long time now.

[4:56:46] And then last Tuesday I think it was, this Carlos Aguirre [ph] arrived and I have this mission to take care of and a certain amount of hand holding meetings to be arranged and one thing or another. And then suddenly this drawing-- oh yes, Thursday night about 11:15, I got this extraordinary call that - Khánum heard, too - from-- oh, Thursday was a holiday. That's right. It was a very restful day, yes. I got this call from Zoran Hojera [ph] about the deadline for this drawing and that I would have to decide by Monday whether or not they were eligible in order for them to get the drawing by the end of the month and legal complexities and one thing or another, and turned out to not be quite so urgent. If they missed this date, they can get the drawing a little later, but that gave me more to be concerned about. And I didn't sleep well that night as I would have liked to. I always hate to have unresolved problems dumped on me in the evening. I don't like that. Much better in the morning. And then there's the reception Friday night and the bigger reception tomorrow night in which I'm holding a lot of store for increasing the recognition of the Faith. All these things simultaneously with having the head of the Cause here and all the activities involved with that, it's really been very intense. But somehow I'm not too much snowed under by it, except just getting very tired. And I hope that I last through all right until she leaves on Wednesday. I'm afraid it's going to be a terrible flop afterwards, because Aguirre is leaving, and the drawing presumably will take place. And Rúhíyyih Khánum will leave and finally, there won't be anything going on here except picking up the pieces, you know, and carrying on. Anyway, such is life.

[4:58:30] Another thing I'm going to mention this evening, which she's mentioned before. She said that the Guardian had a theory that as people get older, their personality traits or characteristics - whatever, I don't remember the exact words she used - get more pronounced. If you are talkative, you get more talkative. If you're hospitable, you get more hospitable, whatever it might be. And she keeps mentioning that in various contexts, contexts. Several times Khánum has asked me when I'm next coming to Haifa. And I don't have any idea what to say. I just say whenever the wind would blow me in that direction, but she always gets a cute expression on her face and seems to want to reciprocate some of the meager hospitality which I have been privileged to extend to her. And I was very touched this morning. I think Violette has been having breakfast with me alone because this morning Khánum had washed her hair. And the other time she wasn't feeling well, one thing or another, so we've had some nice times to talk, just Violette and I. And she said, "You know, I want you to know Greg - " and I was very touched - "that if you come to Haifa, you have a bed and you have a room in our little apartment. And I want you to know that it has nothing to do with you and Bahiyyih that you are a friend of me and of Ali. And you are most welcome." I was really very, very touched by that. I don't know what to do. She said a couple of times, maybe the House of Justice would choose to ask me to come and consult with them about the legal affairs of Haiti, or something or other, any old thing. I don't know. It would be wonderful to be able to come again.

[5:00:30] She also said to me on the way down to the meeting today that often people get educated and become haughty and don't use their education for the Faith. And quite the contrary, they get feeling superior over their other Baháʼís and don't deign to come to the feast very often and consider it doing a privilege, she said, to the Baháʼís when they do. But she said it's wonderful when Baháʼís who are well-educated, and she said, like myself, use their training, their education in service. And she mentioned someone else in the same context. It may have been Arbab, I think, quite a few times. She's mentioned how impressive the things that he's done and he's doing for the Faith are. And she's seen very clearly the fruits of his efforts here in Haiti. Well, as I've said before, I had the feeling that I was already filled overflowing several weeks ago, and still it keeps coming and coming. And I feel like I'm just brimming, and the wondrous stories and experiences just continue to flow abundantly. It's extraordinary. It's very moving. Oh, words fail me. You know, I have a series of restless experiences at this, this time of historic value in the development of the Faith. And I think I better go and get some sleep now. If I think of something else, I'll try to add it later. So this again is Sunday evening, the 21st of November, the end of the day.

[5:02:20] This is now Wednesday, 5:30, the 24th of November. And I'm just back from seeing Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette off at the airport. And I have a few minutes before a dinner engagement and wanted to try to catch up a little bit in these last days of Rúhíyyih Khánum's visit here in Haiti. Monday was a very busy day, culminating in the formal reception that I was offering in Khánum's honor for various distinguished people that I thought would be more receptive than the average to having the privilege of meeting her. I had a very busy day in the office as well, got down there as early I could. I don't remember now exactly the order of things. But I had this expert, Aguirre, who needed appointments. And as I recall, we were supposed to see - oh, I was trying to arrange a meeting with somebody in AID and [?] had come back, so I was trying to arrange an appointment for him. And we needed to also see Arnison [ph] of OEA, OES in English. Then I had to approve this drawing supposedly by noon. Oh, I remember I’d called Xenon [ph]. I was expecting back from him answers about some of the questions I'd had. So I was on the phone continuously during the morning trying to get these things all straightened out and talking to Washington and back and forth, and people were coming into my office. I don't remember now. It all burst together. And then we arranged a lunch with Arnison [ph] and it wasn't as bad as I expected. Things worked very efficiently. Some days can be very much of a strain, but I felt like things were, although there was a lot to do, like it was moving nicely and I wasn't as much strained by it as I might have been.

[5:04:00] So somehow the calls went through and I managed to reach people. And there was only a minor confusion with Aguirre going to AID when he shouldn't have because I didn't quite get him in time and so on. And I had a nice relaxed lunch with him and [?] up at the club. And then the afternoon was devoted to getting tables and rented cutlery. No, I guess I had most of that but I was getting, trying hard to get some more small forks and little plates and I don't remember what all. Oh, glasses to try to get everything needed for the evening. And finally I got up to Stuart's and he wasn't back yet. And Rúhíyyih Khánum was eager and Violette was telling me that she likes to lay out the tables early in the day or even the day before if she's having a reception, and both Violette and Khánum were that way. They wanted to have a lot of time, you see, to arrange things, so I was feeling that maybe that time was getting a little short. And I saw more Moro and Paule and Alana and I don't remember who all, but Stuart wasn't back and he had the truck to get the tables up to the house. So I drove up, made two trips. That's right, up and down, picking up the food and one thing or another, the desserts and so on. And I got to the house around 5:30, I guess, and maybe, yeah, 5:30 or 6:00. And I was, I came in carrying my heavy briefcase and two binders with the papers and other things heavily laden. And here's Rúhíyyih Khánum in a tizzy. Unbelievable. She got herself all worked up. She was in her Japanese robe running back and forth and was asking where we're gonna put the tables, and what are we doing with this, and what's happening with that. And I said there's still an hour and a half. And she said, "An hour and a half goes very fast, now. What are we doing with..." She didn't even let me put my things down, you know. [laughs] It was terribly awkward. And here I was in a little of this and she was just going a mile a minute. She'd gotten wound up.

[5:06:10] So that was actually the most difficult thing for me in the whole evening was her, which wasn't what I expected. But it turned out, in retrospect, I didn't realize but she's really not at all comfortable with dignitaries, hasn't apparently had very much experience with this kind of thing. And she's mentioned quite a few times in the last days how her - today she called her mother Bohemian and her father a recluse. Maybe it was last night. Anyway, she was explaining again how they have not taken advantage of the opportunities they had for access in higher social circles in Montreal. And so I guess she never had much experience with that growing up. And of course, the Guardian had very severe limitations on the sorts of things he could go to for fear of not being treated properly. And so I guess, I don't know, but I guess she's really not had that many occasions like this. And she was very nervous and concerned that she say the right thing and do the right thing, and it was actually too nervous. I think some of that came through, a lack of being relaxed and regal. I expected her to sort of be, I don't know, very, very suave or something, you know. And I think some of these people were a little bit taken aback, rather taken aback by her. She was bubbling with energy and focusing very hard on the situation and coming across a little bit strong.

[5:07:40] Anyway, we got the thing arranged. This fellow who I was paying $80 to come, and with two people, he only came with one. And I really didn't like him, but I was, there was nothing I could do. I tried on Monday, the other person that I could think of who ran [?], someone named Sherry [ph], who I've seen at receptions and was very good. He does the central organizing for receptions given by the [?]. And unfortunately, I didn't realize he teaches in the same school. He's in charge of the food section, and this other guy, [??], is in-charge of the bar. And so he said he really couldn't cut in on something that his colleague had arranged, and the next time I could ask him. So I was stuck with [?]. This guy showed up late. He did a very nice job with the flowers and getting the table legs covered and things like that, but I wasn't very pleased with him being so late. And the whole thing was a little bit on the slow side. He wasn't all that good, and he did a terrible thing. I was just terribly embarrassed that he left the soda pop bottles on the table. Here are people who are having enough trouble because we weren't serving anything alcoholic, and they didn't need to have a table littered with Team and Pepsi bottles. Anyway, one does one’s best, but that I tend to, I think Khánum is certainly like this more than I am, I tend to be worried about the little mistakes too much and not look at the positive accomplishments. I get terribly sensitive about making an error of some kind, and those things were bothering me a little bit.

[5:09:00] Anyway, we finally got everything in order. Three tables in the main part of the living room, dining room area, enough to seat 24 people and the buffet laid out and everything looked very nice. And Khánum had rearranged all my furniture. When I got home, I found the place all turned upside down, everything around, and they'd gotten all kinds of chairs to make a big circle so most of the people could sit in a circle and Khánum was busy counting places diligently. And then she got all wound up about who was gonna sit where, and I thought that through and so on. My plan, which I wish I had stuck to in retrospect, was to just let people sit where they wanted. And they can't blame you if they don't like the seating, and make it informal, you see? But Khánum was very concerned that we not offend an important person and that they be at her table. And she was talking along about this right beforehand, so I got that idea in my head and I was, you know, it's hard for me to talk back to her, and I certainly wasn't wanting to intrude. And she was treating it like her occasion, and she was inviting people, you see. So I sort of let her go along, but that was the source of the biggest mistake, if there was one, of the evening.

[5:10:05] Anyway, people all arrived starting quite promptly at 7:30. The French ambassador first, in all of his dignity, and his wife was sick still with dengue fever and wasn't able to come. And then one after another, all these people came. The guests were the American ambassador Preeg who also left his wife behind, said she was indisposed or something. The French ambassador [?], the Minister of Finance, who was the last person to arrive who brought his lovely wife, and they were up to their usual caliber, wonderful people. Franz Mayzo [ph] and his wife. And his wife had, I don't know if I mentioned this before, had called me on Tuesday the week before to apologize for not having come because she’d gotten the week confused. She’d gotten all dressed and ready to come and her husband hadn't shown up. There was a confusion. I was very pleased that they came. And the Currellys came, and Michael Bannister. Our lawyer Colimo [ph] came and I gathered his wife must have passed away. I didn't know that. And he apologized for his daughter, who had also invited Elizabeth Colimo [ph], said she was indisposed or something. Pierre Legé came with his wife, had been in town for several days apparently. I was very pleased, and so was Khánum about that. And Jean-Claude Sano came and said his wife was in the US. She works for American Airlines and travels easily. He’s the director general of a central bank. And I was surprised, you know, the last time he came to [?] here, he was talking business all the time with his friends, but he got into the spirit of the thing and was talking about voodoo and one thing or another and I was very pleased. And then we had Fred Thomas and his wife, UNDP representative. And Bob Belfry and his lovely wife, Canadian. He’s the representative of the American Development Bank here. And the Arnisons came, [?]. He’s the OAS man here. And am I forgetting anybody? I think that's it. And with all of us together, it added up to 20 people, and we took away four of the places that weren’t needed.

[5:12:13] So we milled around and right away, of course, the two ambassadors were wanting to talk to Rúhíyyih Khánum and she was sitting down and they were standing up. And here's the French ambassador who’s quite tall and the American who’s much shorter, bending over to talk with her and looking rather uncomfortable. And she was sitting talking with them, and I was feeling uncomfortable myself about how this whole thing was going to fall together. The other people were having a good time. And I was glad that Michael Bannister came because his project reforestation is very popular, and everybody wants to know about it and interested to meet him. And the Currellys mixed very well, too. I was quite pleased about that. So about an hour later, we served this fruit punch that had been concocted, and I was feeling awfully awkward about not having the drinks that people are used to either. But that was Khánum’s decision, and I, what do you call it, acquiesced to her will on that. And then the buffet was finally ready and the candles lit and so on so I invited people to the table. Wait, a mosquito here, missed him. And then the problem came of seating everybody. And I sort of steered the French ambassador and the Minister of Finance over to sit near Khánum, but I wasn't moving fast enough, and the American ambassador had already sit down at another table. And Khánum said something about “be sure to get the ambassador over” or something, so I made them - I think, in retrospect, it was a mistake of asking him if he wouldn't move over to the big table. The way it worked out was that all the main invitees were men, and of course, their wives came but we ended up with a head table of all men, and that isn't quite according to the usual procedures.

[5:14:05] Anyway, we sat there, and Khánum was busy pointing her finger and lecturing to these senior ambassadors and the minister. And they were a little taken aback but it was very nice, the things that she said. And she went and launched into a long explanation of why Baháʼís don't drink and why we prefer not to serve alcohol in our own homes, although we have no objection to other people drinking in their own environment or in a restaurant or whatever, and went into that at great length. And then we talked quite a long time about the things that she likes about Haiti and voodoo and fear and a few other related topics, and the people got rather involved in that discussion and seemed to enjoy that, but there were a few awkward moments. For instance, Khánum was so busy talking that she ate very slowly and the other tables had long since finished. And I had my eye on them, too, so I didn't think it was polite of everybody to just sit there waiting for dessert for so long. So I finally got this fellow [?] two to clear the buffet to bring out the desserts, but he hadn't been doing his job, and the desserts weren't ready to come out yet. They needed a lot of arranging or something or other, and he cleared the food off the buffet before bringing, before the dessert was ready to replace it. So almost everything was gone, except for a little bit of chicken or something and one rice dish. And Khánum suddenly decides that she's going to have some seconds, you see. Everybody else had decided they didn't want any, declined the offer. And she asked the French ambassador if he would join her, and he graciously said yes. So they got up and here’s this empty table, almost. Well, they very delicately took a little bit of what was there, you know, and that was all right. As I said she was really wound up and going a mile a minute.

[5:15:50] Anyway, so she finished her seconds and then finally the dessert came and everybody had a little dessert. And then we moved over to the, where the comfortable chairs were and everybody was served some coffee. And then she gets the notion of offering cigarettes. She had said beforehand, she’d asked me if I had any cigarettes and I said no. And she said, “Well, it's terribly impolite not to offer cigarettes to people after a meal.” I don't think, in French homes that I've been to here, that's certainly the case, that you offer a nice cigar, good quality imported cigarettes but you also offer after-dinner drink and you offer before-dinner drink and you offer wine at the table and all these things, and we hadn’t been doing that during the evening, so I didn't really see the point in making a big fuss about it. But for some reason she had in mind, maybe from Canadian politeness, that that was the thing to do. And last night I was at the French ambassador’s who’s top notch, you know, in these things and he didn't offer cigarettes to the guests. Anyway, so she got this, she had gotten, asked me to call John Currelly had brought some cigarettes up with him, which she’d bought on the way. And she'd arranged them in the little wooden bowl that she bought and she went trooping around almost prancing, offering cigarettes to everybody. Most of the people don't smoke, so they declined. You know, she's so full of enthusiasm and almost girlish sometimes. It's really very interesting and in an occasion when I would have expected her to be very reserved and dignified, she was some of the time quite the opposite. I’m not saying that’s bad. It just wasn't what I expected and it struck me oddly.

[5:17:30] So, but people didn't want to go home. I was trying to move things along so that people who were busy the next day, had to get up early would, you know, wouldn't be uncomfortable in leaving. The French ambassador somehow had the idea it was a cocktail, and he had to call his wife to tell her that he wasn't coming home for dinner, and I let him into my office for that which is a terrible mess. Hadn’t had time to keep it straight and I felt a bit embarrassed. And then he couldn't maneuver the electronic telephone and I had to come back in and help him. He was very, I think he's decided that he likes me after the faux pas that I did in his house and offended his wife. I think that over time he's come to look at me a little bit more grandfatherly and he was very, very friendly and relaxed and informal. Anyway, so everybody was sitting around just talking until at least 11:00, I guess, when people started to go home. And I was quite surprised and pleased that they found the atmosphere that warm and friendly, particularly without drinks and so on. They seemed to have a good time. And finally everybody started to leave, but Rúhíyyih Khánum was still going a mile a minute and she didn't want to [‘’laughs’’] go to bed. She knew she wouldn't go to sleep, I suppose, so the Baháʼís stayed behind. The Currellys and Michael Bannister and Rúhíyyih Khánum was still talking and talking and talking, and I was just by that time getting to the absolute limit and was completely wiped out and having a hard time surviving, you know? And they didn't go home and Khánum didn’t go to bed until about midnight. And then there was still some closing up to do and whatnot, and I really hit the sack card when I hit it. And I had an appointment the next morning at 9:30 with the head of AID, [?] for Aguirre [ph] so I knew I had to get an early start yesterday morning, Tuesday. It looks like this is about to run out. So, but I think it was a very unbalanced and successful evening.

[5:19:30] Oh, one thing that really threw the, shocked me and threw the wrench into the works for me was after dinner we were standing around and I was talking with Mrs. Thomas, who's Radcliffe educated and just reeks of it. And we were talking about one thing or another, and she was expressing very strong opinions about Islam and one thing or another and contradicting me and doing the same kind of intellectual battling that is so typical of Harvard and Radcliffe type people. And most unpleasant, instead of trying to find a source of agreement, you try to find the source of disagreement, and then you try to prove that you're right and the other person is wrong. You know, it's really most unfortunate. Anyway, after we talked for quite a while, she came out with this very strong opinion that she was very offended, she said, by the way that Rúhíyyih Khánum had gathered all the big shots around her and acted like a, I don't know, she was some kind of a big shot herself, and not the sort of what Mrs. Thomas thought would be a more religious attitude of mixing and mingling equally with all people, which she thought was a principle of the Baháʼí Faith. And she went on and on about this. I realized later, I was really taken aback and shocked and rather hurt and partly it was my fault because she was sitting at the same table where the American ambassador had sat and I picked him up and took him away, you see, and she felt offended by that, and she blamed Rúhíyyih Khánum for it. But I'm sure there's also a backlog with frustration of the highly educated women.

[5:20:54] This is tape number five being made on Wednesday, the 24th of November regarding Rúhíyyih Khánum’s visit to Haiti. I was just in the middle of finishing my description of the reception that I gave for Rúhíyyih Khánum on Monday evening, and I've been realizing thinking back that Mrs. Thomas must have a backlog of frustration being the educated wife of an official and having him always invited to things, and I don't know. I mean, she's probably venting something that wasn't unnecessarily generated entirely by the evening but it was a shame if she vented it to her husband, who seemed to have a positive impression to get him thinking along the same negative lines. And I was rather upset by it. It’s taken me a couple of days to work it through. Khánum said today that she hasn't slept well for the last two nights, thinking about the things that she said and whether she should have said them better, whether, you know, she said the right things and whether she made a good impression and so on and so on. I've been very careful not to say anything about what I saw as the errors of the evening because I don't think that it's really important for her to know and wouldn't, you know, I mean, she’d probably amplify them, or feel badly about them or something, and they were not that important compared to the positive impression. But I'm afraid I was distressed that night and also very tired and maybe didn’t give her the feeling that I thought it was as much of a success as would have been nice to give her the feeling of it if you get what I’m saying. So I suppose the other people enjoyed themselves.

[5:22:30] I've seen the Minister of Finance since, and Thomas and Belfry [ph] and Xenon [ph] [?] and the French Ambassador. And Belfry and the French ambassador said that she was a very unusual lady or something like that, but didn't say anything else. And [?] said that she was remarkable or something, very nicely put but I think they probably all thought it was a little bit strange. It's really an unusual kind of evening for them, and I don't really know how they received it. Someday, maybe I'll know better but people don't usually tell you if they didn't like the evening or whatever. Of course, the ambassadors and the minister had a chance to talk about business and so forth, and they always appreciate an occasion for that. During this time before everybody left in the evening, one thing I remember is that John Currelly asked Rúhíyyih Khánum if anybody in the family smoked. We were talking for some reason about smoking, anybody in the holy family, and she said, “Well, my dear, the Greatest Holy Leaf. somebody had told her that smoking after every meal was good for her digestion.” So apparently she smoked a cigarette, I think she said, after every meal. And she said that the Bahá’u’lláh sat very contentedly with his hubble bubble by the tigress or the Euphrates, whatever it was, at one time, anyway. The ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, of course, didn't smoke. And what else did she say? I don't remember if there's anybody else in the family, but she said, you know, the obvious thing that smoking is not forbidden in the Faith. We're told that it's not a clean habit, but it's certainly not prohibited. And the Guardian offered cigarettes to, you know, visitors, important visitors and so forth.

[5:24:08] I have a couple of other little notes here on a little pad that I keep by the bed. I think those things as I'm going to sleep, and I don't want to forget them. On Sunday, she mentioned that she had only been alone with the Guardian 15 minutes before they were married, and she really didn't know him at all. And she said several times that she was worried that he was going to turn out to have very different tastes than hers and that that would be a difficult thing for her. She was afraid, for instance, that he would like modern art, which she doesn't like at all, and modern music. And it turned out that he had similar taste to hers, more towards the traditional. He also mentioned that he'd given, she also mentioned that he had given her the title Amatu'l-Bahá, the name Amatu'l-Bahá, I think it was when they were engaged, during that process, when he was, she and her mother were on pilgrimage and he was trying to make up his mind, she said, about whether he was going to marry her. And he wouldn't tell her what it meant. He was teasing her. Sometime earlier, one of the breakfast that I was having with Violette, alone, she said that, you know, Rúhíyyih Khánum never deviates, she said. She said she's like a compass, always true to the, you know, pointed in the right direction. And a very unusual quality, of course. And Rúhíyyih Khánum also mentioned, I think on Sunday that-- and I don't remember exactly when it was. I think we may have been driving or something. That character and deeds are not the same thing. Well, maybe this is on the way down to the meeting on Sunday. She said that many of the early martyrs did not have a good character, and we remember them for their great deed or deeds, but that doesn't mean that's necessarily the same thing as their being saints, as she put it. And that was something that was hard for her, she said, to understand, but it's certainly the case. Then yesterday, Tuesday, as I said I had to leave early in the morning for this appointment and we were, Aguirre had to leave and I had to get something xeroxed for him to take and one thing or another. And the drawing went through and I got that, those things wound up, and was very tired and was trying to leave the bank to come back here for lunch, even though Khánum had gone out with Paule and Moro. How was that? Oh, she went up to the mission to try to buy a tablecloth that she had seen and not bought and realized later it was the right size for a large table she has for entertaining, beautiful red tablecloth. And today she told me it had already been sold and she was very disappointed. And there were some other things she wanted to do. She was very busy that day. Oh, she went out. Oh, I know it’s the Currellys that she went with and she went and saw their factory and their house. And then she went and saw Hans and Matty Thimm out of the school and apparently went up to the mission. And it was quite busy.

[5:27:07] Anyway, so I came back and they were gone. Oh, I was trying to get out of my office, and then I’d already told the secretary I was going home and I went to take care of one other technical problem. And then the governor wanted to see me so I got pulled in and he's always very talkative, and I was just worried that I was going to die but fortunately there was a lady there who was waiting in the [?] to move aside while I was talking to me and we had a nice little chat about a number of things and didn't go on too long. And then I had the excuse to excuse myself because of this lady. I came home and had some lunch, and I was just completely dead. And I just went to sleep kerplunk about three o'clock, and I slept until about 6:00. And it was really what I needed, because in the evening I'd already agreed to go first to the Canadian ambassador's reception. We had 16 ambassadors in town and Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs of Canada and all kinds of dignitaries, the Vice President of CDA for the Caribbean. The undersecretary is Massi, M-A-S-S-I, apparently. That's the way it spelled in the paper, and Keith Besenzon [ph] is the vice president of CDA. And I stopped in there and was whisked over by the ambassador over to talk to two of them right away and had a brief word with Massi and a little longer with Besenzon and met the Haitian ambassador to Ottawa,[?], a very nice young man, and talked with the - what's her name? The Director General [?] in the Foreign Affairs here. And then it started to get a little boring. And anyway, I only had a few minutes there because I had an invitation at 8:00 to the French ambassadors for this [?] there for the [Economique?], to [?] and a number of other people in the development field were invited to the French ambassador's. And I had agreed to go there thinking that Khánum would be packing. So she had invited, because she knew I was going out, she’d invited the Baruks and Stuart had come to pick up his tables. The dear man, he'd come 5:30 in the morning to pick up all the chairs that he'd handled for me, and then he came late in the afternoon to pick up his tables and put them back in his house. And he stayed around and talked with Rúhíyyih Khánum for a while while I was still resting. And then when I came out, Khánum first, Violette pulled me aside and then Khánum pulled me into my office and said, “Please get rid of Stuart. The dear man doesn't know when to leave. And we wanna eat and we're very tired and wanna eat and go to bed.” So I very gently showed him out the door. Didn't really take any pushing, just a little. And then I sat with them while they ate some dinner, and I went on my way and they were very tired. And I think they went to sleep pretty soon after. And we're packing today.

[5:30:05] But it was then last night that I mentioned something about how the American ambassador was short and it was a disadvantage for an ambassador to be short. It's good for them to be tall and tower over people, and she sort of took note of that. And I think a little bit later she said something about how the Guardian was very short, shorter than the American ambassador, and she pointed to her shoulder. At least an inch below her shoulder was as high as the Guardian came on her. Extraordinary because with the grandeur of his writing and of course, his station and so on, you’d tend to think of him as being tall and that's what people say also about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Bahá’u’lláh, I guess. I remember the Currellys came by just before the Canadian reception that they were invited to, too, and we were all standing around talking, and that's when she mentioned that. So today, I was, I got up a little late. I didn't have any appointments and had a very pleasant breakfast with Rúhíyyih Khánum and called down to the office afterwards about 10:00 to see if anything was going on and nothing was. And then I got a call from the office that the Minister of Finance wanted to see me and if I would please come down to [?]. So I rushed around to get the rented China in the car and the four legs of the tables that didn't fit the first time and all this stuff so I wouldn't have to make an extra trip later and my briefcase and got myself together. Khánum and Violette we're up packing at this point, and she'd said several times that she wanted to have a chance to talk with me before she left. And so we agreed, sort of that it would be better if they got the packing finished, and then she could relax and talk. So I was hoping that this wasn't some kind of terrible crisis that the minister was going to tell me about, a Cabinet change or something that would give me a terrible conflict between having lunch and taking Rúhíyyih Khánum to the airport and my work.

[5:32:05] But I went and waited for quite a long time, and then so I mean, it was only a small affair about the importation of some buses. And then I went to my office and called Washington and sort of touched base. And then there was nothing more to keep me there, and so I came back up to the house. And they were still up, packing and Dioso [ph] had gone. Leon [ph] had deserted me Tuesday morning and still wasn't back now, so. And Dioso [ph] had gone down to get a shot and left his wife here to help, so I was hoping that the last lunch wouldn’t turn out to be a disaster. But eventually, Violette came down and I asked her which of the three shawls that I bought in [?] she thought that Rúhíyyih Khánum would like, and she said that she thought the right blue one. Then I asked her which one she would like and she wanted the beige brown one, leaving the bright red one behind. So she took those up and the tape that I’d copied and the plastic coat hanger which I just finished gluing. I don’t remember what else. And eventually they came down and we had a very nice lunch, some leftovers and some potatoes and salad. And Violette was telling me again how much they appreciated their visit and how she thought that the hospitality that I've been able to offer was very important in making their stay as long and as agreeable as it was, and that Khánum hadn't gotten seriously ill and seemed to have lots of energy and enthusiasm and so on. It's very touching, really. And on the way down, Khánum was saying that usually she's quite happy to leave one country and go on to the next one. But in the case of Haiti, she really was sad to leave and that she likes Haiti so much. I said that she was quite welcome to stay.

[5:33:45] Anyway, she finished her part of the packing and left Violette upstairs to close the suitcases. And it was all arranged so that Rúhíyyih Khánum would have a minute alone with me. And we sat at the table while she was having her coffee and dessert, and she said, “You know, Greg,“ she said, “I have a speech that I've been rehearsing for the last two years and I want to give it to you or else I won't feel good.” And then she told me that when they were left with the affairs of the Cause and the Holy Land, the Hands of the Cause, she told the other Hands that she was a very direct person, that she didn't mince words, and she didn't know any other way of being except telling exactly what she thought. And she said that she hoped that would be all right. Oh, no, it was the Hands-- it was the House of Justice, I guess, because when they were elected, because she said that Ian Sample said that “Please don't change, Rúhíyyih Khánum because we always know exactly where we're at with you.” Something to that, to that - I mean, that was the gist of it. And then she proceeded to deliver her speech, which was extraordinary. And I'm going to put my remarks about it on the other side, so I can, because it's more personal, so I can segregate it if I want to. But it was very touching, really. She's a wonderful, warm, concerned, human being and just full of love and compassion for her fellow men. And that took about half an hour, and then we got the case into the car and bundled up, and they left all kinds of things behind to be taken by pilgrims and the members of the National Assembly going to the international convention in various and sundry baskets and bags and whatnot. And I drove them down to the airport, and the Baruks were right behind us. They joined us on the way down the mountain. Their car was just turning the corner.

[5:35:40] We had quite a little gathering of Baháʼís down there by the time they'd gotten checked through the line and I got permission from the people in protocol to use the diplomatic lounge. So we had this motley crew of the Baháʼís in there, all gathered around Rúhíyyih Khánum, saying goodbye for about an hour. And more people kept arriving and my colleagues from the Citibank and Bank of Boston both arrived. One was meeting people and the other was saying goodbye to an official, and they looked rather curiously at this group of people gathered down at the end over my friends. It’s a little bit funny, but there was nobody, any real big shot to come through to wonder what was going on. And Rúhíyyih Khánum had forgotten that she was wanting to present to the National Assembly a calligraphy of Mr. Faizi’s, which had been beautifully illuminated, a lovely passage. And she wanted to make a formal presentation during the institute down at the center, but she'd forgotten so she handed it over to Moro and the other members of the National Assembly at that time. And we all had a very nice little meeting before saying goodbye and because I have the extra privileges, I was fortunate enough to be able to go through the immigration and accompany them all the way to the gate. And Rúhíyyih Khánum gave me a big hug and kiss me smack on the cheek in this very, very [‘’smacking lips’’] - well, she doesn't like goodbyes, but it was really very tender and touching to me that she had become so attached. And Violette gave me an eager and even warmer hug. And I, with great sadness, saw them off onto the plane and we all stood around. I joined the other Baháʼís up on the observation deck, and we stood around for quite a long time while they loaded some more baggage and one thing or another. And then the plane turned around and left. And that was the end of Rúhíyyih Khánum’s visit here. Well, I'm sure I'll think of other things and want to add them to the end of this, but at the moment this is late in the afternoon of Wednesday, the 24th of November, the day that Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette left Haiti.

[5:37:51] This is now the next morning and I have in fact thought of a couple of things to add here. Khánum mentioned, I think, yesterday that - I guess we're talking about this reception and her thinking so much about whether she’d said things right. And she said, “You know, I received an invitation to give a talk, a big talk at one of the--” I don’t remember which one but one of the conferences that opened a Ten Year Crusade, if I remember correctly and she mentioned she decided right away that she would accept. And she mentioned the Guardian and he said that “Can you?” Or something like that. That's paraphrased. And she said, “Well, Guardian if I’ve lived - “ what was it? Ten? Anyway - “so many years with you, surely I must have something to say to the Baháʼís.” But in fact that she did get very nervous before that talk and didn't sleep for weeks or something like that. And she said the same thing about Bahiyyih and her big talk about the Greatest Holy Leaf in Montreal that she'd been very nervous beforehand. She also was talking at a different time, yesterday breakfast or I don’t remember when, quite a long story, I think it was yesterday breakfast. Let’s see, what was it that she said of? Oh, a guinea fowl, it’s her guinea fowl that the caterers had brought some for the two receptions. And this got her thinking and she told this elaborate story about this very important banker's president of the Bankers Trust or something like that in New York who is an old friend of her mother's. And apparently they went back while the families were close, partly because at a much earlier time, the son, I guess, of that family - I'm not sure of the details, but this is the general idea - had borrowed some money from the company that he was working for, and it wasn't quite stealing, but there must have been something a little wrong with it, or he didn't have the money to pay it back or something. And so instead of facing up to his wrongdoing or misdemeanor, whatever it was, he disappeared. He ran away, went away. His family didn’t know where he was, and they were terribly worried. And apparently May saw him in a train somewhere. She was traveling back and forth, I suppose, between Montreal and New York or whatever it was and whatever to talk to him and explain to him that his family was very worried and concerned and upset and that there was no problem and “you really should go back to them”. So he did. And they were then, after that, very indebted to her. And so at the Guardian’s - at the Master’s passing, apparently somebody called May. She was in a big hotel in New York. I don’t remember the name. And she just passed out on the floor, which apparently was her want. She passed out frequently, but she was just completely overwhelmed and the shock deepened, apparently. It was very, very severe, and she got into a tremendous state and couldn't be moved. And Khánum said that it must have crossed everything her father had saved at least $50,000 to support her for at least she said a year. I don't know if it was that long, but a long time living in this hotel and having all kinds of specialists come and having somebody waiting on her because her father couldn't get away from his work up in Montreal. And here May was in New York, and Rúhíyyih Khánum was staying there in a different room and here May, I suppose, was in a suite or something, and it was just very, very difficult. And Khánum was 11 at the time and said that it was a tremendous test because her mother kept calling her in and saying “when I die, you must take care of your father” and “you must this” and “you must that”. [‘’laughs’’] And they didn't know from minute to minute whether she was going to die or become insane or what. It was a great strain.

[5:40:50] So finally, this other family, this banker fellow, decided to offer some help, and he offered a private train, a private car with a private engine to take May up to Montreal. And the fear was that she couldn't be jigged and jogged and the trip might be too much of a strain for her, but if they went slowly and went over to a siding and rested and made a 12-hour trip into a 48-hour trip that maybe it wouldn't be too much for her. And that was something that Sutherland Maxwell couldn't afford, but they graciously accepted the invitation, take advantage of this man’s generosity. And thereby there they got her up to Montreal and May wanted to go up to Montreal and we’re just worried about the trip. So later, May wanted to reciprocate this favor, and she arranged for a pianist of some kind who was playing a newly invented instrument. I think it was some Russian or something that invented the instrument, and she tried to explain it, but I didn't quite understand. But anyway, the two of them were traveling together, the inventor and the musician. And they were friends, apparently, of the Maxwells. And they'd just given the concert in Carnegie Hall, or were about to, one or the other. And May arranged for a private concert for this banker and his family, a very exclusive sort of thing in the hotel suite. And so that was a very pleasant evening, and they had guinea fowl under glass, she said that's what she remembered [‘’laughs’’]. It got her thinking about this story. But afterwards this banker pulled May aside and she said now, “What do you, what do you - what does this young man want? What do they want from me?” And she was commenting on how rich people are so much accustomed to having everybody expecting something from them and not expecting people to just give them something. And May said, “Don't be ridiculous. I’m just offering this to you. You’re so rich that you think people always want something from you?” [‘’laughs’’] Something like that. Also at another time yesterday, Khánum mentioned that probably she was talking about how adorable Shoghi Effendi was and that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was, too. And she said probably Bahá’u’lláh was, too, although He was so high that we don't think of Him in those terms but probably He was at least equally as adorable, as she put it. So this again is the morning now of Thursday the 25th of November 1982.

[5:43:10] This is now the second of December. And there were a couple of things that I had made a note of and didn't have time and space to put on the other side. I wanted to add here. One was as Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette were getting ready to leave, Khánum was upstairs packing and Violette came down from about some business or other, I don't remember. And she confided in me that packing with Rúhíyyih Khánum is a tremendous trial and tribulation, that she leaves everything to the last minute and then gets in a big flurry and is always under a lot of pressure and makes everybody very miserable in the process, apparently. Whereas she said that, Violette said that for herself she would rather put things together well in advance. And she referred to somebody, I don’t remember who, who liked to have everything packed at least the day ahead, you know, the night before, everything put in the suitcase and zipped and ready to go. But Rúhíyyih Khánum is not like that, and puts everyone under certain strain as she rushes about. However, it didn't seem too bad to me this time because she got everything enough under control that Violette could finish it off, and it was all carefully planned so that Rúhíyyih Khánum would have time to talk with me alone while Violette was upstairs “closing the bags”. And it didn't seem to be too bad irrationally, certainly left in a very good time for the airport with no anxieties. But I thought that was interesting because I have the same character flaw. Maybe not quite exactly the same in substance, but certainly in expression.

[5:44:49] The other thing I was thinking is that looking back on Rúhíyyih Khánum’s visit, it's become very plain to me that her approach, at least here to her Baháʼí work, is quite different from that of other people, even counselors and other Hands of the Cause, and I don't know whether it's her personality or her fundamental perceptions, or just this remark that the Guardian made about that she would travel and encourage the friends. But what she does, very obviously, is regard the Baháʼí community as the sum of the individual Baháʼís. And then she sets about thinking about the needs and the challenges and the tests and the joys and so forth of those individuals and encouraging them as individuals with a great deal of focus on each person, at least among the active friends, and what they individually need, which is a very different approach from, for instance, Councillor Arbab or many other people who would sort of look at the overall state of affairs and the processes in motion and the challenges and give a general talk to a roomful of people and try to encourage supposedly, I presume, the community as a whole but without having as much time or interest really in each individual person and their own particular situation. And as I mentioned in the course of these tapes, Rúhíyyih Khánum spend a great deal of time discussing and asking about each individual Baháʼí and then even making elaborate plans on occasion for how to approach particularly difficult problems or making notes of subjects to address a larger meeting, but particularly addressed to some individual who she thought could benefit from those remarks.

[5:46:40] And for instance, her thinking for almost two years about what she thought I could benefit from and rehearsing the lines [‘’laughs’’] as it were and having a little speech which is entirely for my benefit and would be different for somebody else, you see. That is an example of this kind of expression of this approach, which takes a certain amount of time. But it certainly has left, I think, very important indelible impressions on quite a few different Baháʼís who were privileged to be the subject of her attentions during this long and detailed effort of hers here in Haiti to encourage all the individual active believers. I had Michael Bannister over for dinner last night, and one of the things he mentioned was a great sense of outpouring of love and affection from Rúhíyyih Khánum and great interest in, I guess, in himself, certainly, but I don't know if he meant also directed to another believers or the believers in general, and that's certainly the impression that I've had and other people have had about this visit of hers. I don't know whether that's more something that is increasing with her, with age or whether it's just that we didn't know her as well before, and this has been a characteristic that she's had all along. I don't really know, but it’s certainly very pronounced - what was it - during this visit of hers in Haiti. So this again is December 2nd, 1982.