Focus on Moral Education

While the focus has long been on basic literacy and math skills, the tutorial schools have also emphasized moral education. In addition to teaching basic ethical principles, the moral curriculum in Bahá'í schools promotes a set of progressive ideals, including the equality of women and men, the importance of eliminating all forms of prejudice, and the concept of the oneness of humanity.

Some 30 years of this type of education has had a distinctive impact on the Guaymí Bahá'ís, who have sought to incorporate these principles in their daily life.

Guaymí youth in the Soloy region, where the network of schools has been most fully developed, speak forthrightly about the degree to which this educational process has given them a new vision of their own identity and capacities.

Ms. Sanchez, for example, works as a broadcaster at Radio Bahá'í, producing and reading programs and news in their native language, Ngäbere. A one-kilowatt non-commercial station that reaches most of Chiriquí Province, Radio Bahá'í has thus helped to give Ngäbere a new regard in the region.

Tahireh said she feels her service at the radio station is important in helping to protect and preserve her culture. She also feels, however, that some aspects of her culture, such as the traditional domination of women by men, can and should be discarded.

She herself has married another young Guaymí Bahá'í, and they have sought to apply the principles of equality in their marriage, she said.

"In the house sometimes he cooks, and sometimes I do," she said. "Sometimes I wash the clothes, and sometimes he does."

Carbila Cuevas, who is also 23 and works with Tahireh at the radio station, feels similarly about the importance of preserving those aspects of culture of which they are proud and discarding those aspects that are oppressive.

"My father used to tell me that we should not let the outside world come to the area, because it will destroy us," said Mr. Cuevas. "My father said people are forgetting the old language and traditions.

"But Radio Bahá'í has preserved many of these old traditions and we are trying to help people not to forget about them. So during the last 10 or 15 years, most of the Guaymís are learning to love their language, and also their traditions and stories."

In his view, however, not all of the old traditions are good. Mr. Cuevas tells about a traditional form of ritual combat, called "balseria," in which the men of whole villages battle each other by swatting at each other's ankles with huge logs of balsa wood. Injuries are common, he said, and balseria is usually accompanied by much drunkenness. It can also produce lingering feelings of hatred or resentment if participants come to feel their opponents have been unfair.

"Now in the Bahá'í communities, we don't do this," he said. "We dance in the traditional way to celebrate holidays." But because drinking and fighting are against Bahá'í teachings, they avoid balseria -- and the divisions it often produces, said Mr. Cuevas.

Structures of Unity

Because of their commitment to certain common principles and their participation in joint activities, the Guaymí Bahá'ís can be said to form a community within a community. However, although the highest concentration of Guaymí Bahá'ís resides in villages near Soloy, the Bahá'ís do not live separately or apart from their kinfolk. Rather, Bahá'í families live dispersed throughout the region.



Mariano Rodriguez, his wife Bernarda Bejerano, and their youngest son, Abraham, standing in front of their house in Soloy. Mr. Rodriguez said he believes that the Bahá'í teachings on equality and consultation have helped him get along better with his wife, improving their family life.



What unites them is a network of local governing councils, known as local Spiritual Assemblies, which guide their activities. The Guaymís have established about 25 local Spiritual Assemblies throughout Chiriquí Province.

Like the some 20,000 other local Spiritual Assemblies in the Bahá'í world, these local councils are elected each year, following democratic principles, and they utilize a distinctive non-adversarial decision-making method known as consultation.

The very act of gathering together and electing such locally based institutions has contributed greatly to a new sense of empowerment and capacity among Guaymí Bahá'ís, say outside observers.

"Until recently the concept of Guaymí ethnicity was probably very weak," said Whitney Lyn White, an American anthropologist who spent some three months studying the Guaymí Bahá'ís in 1993 and is one of the few outsiders to carefully analyze their situation. "Family alliances, and shifting kin-based alliances expand and contract depending on the 'enemy.'

"But the Guaymís are under a survival pressure to resist the encroachment of outsiders. And one level of response to this pressure is found in the creation of unity among the Guaymí Bahá'ís.

"The Bahá'í Faith has provided a new leadership model in its institutions, which has greatly expanded the group identity. It also offers spiritual principles that help to maintain unity in groups, so that the group can do something together. Principles like the elimination of racial and ethnic prejudice, in this situation, work to eliminate divisions between families and between clans," Ms. White said.

Guaymí Bahá'ís said the teachings of the Faith about unity had indeed helped them to get along better with their neighbors.

"Lots of my neighbors have problems with their families," said Mariano Rodriquez, a 53-year-old farmer near Soloy who has been a Bahá'í since 1963, explaining that fighting between families and between husbands and wives is not uncommon. "The difference is that the Bahá'ís, within their understanding, are trying to live in peace."


OneCountry (e-mail: 1Country@BIC.Org) | Contents | 1994 Issues