Brian and Pamela O’Toole in 2017

It was July 1978. I had just arrived in Guyana as a young Bahá’í to pioneer to a land I had already grown to love through a 6-week teaching trip the previous year. The colourful Auxiliary Board member took me out for lunch days after arriving and told me about Marion Jack* and how I was to lay my bones in this new land. As a 24-year old, that was not what I had in mind. Neither did I have in mind that 42 years later I would still be here.

I was the product of one of the early ‘cross cultural’ marriages, a Persian mother and an Irish father. Sadly, it didn’t work and they separated and later divorced. My brother and I lived with my mother or father depending on whichever lawyer won the latest divorce proceedings case. When we were with my mother, whether we were in in Torquay, Exeter or Cambridge, we attended Bahá’í functions with her. Always very warm gatherings but mostly Iranian in culture, language, food and chants. I remember being in gatherings in Cambridge where great respect was shown to Hand of the Cause John Ferraby but then his family were almost the only persons there who were not Iranians. My father did his best to promote cynicism towards my mother’s roots at a time when it really wasn’t too cool to be different in a primary school in Maidstone, Kent, where everyone in the class was very, very white.

I had no interest in religion. I was brought up in the tradition of Catholicism – more the discipline rather than the beauty of the church. I would attend mass on Sundays and look forward to the priest announcing “eta miss iese” – go, the mass has ended, which relayed freedom at the end of the service. I certainly was not a seeker.

In 1970 I won a scholarship to go to Iceland with a friend to ‘study the Icelandic sagas.’ From Maidstone we drove to Glasgow and we needed somewhere to leave the car while we travelled to Iceland. I called the Tahzib family in Glasgow and explained our position, making it clear that I was not a Bahá’í. They invited us home and baby-sat my car for the next five weeks. That night I attended my first fireside in their home. Dr Tahzib was very sick in hospital at the time – but the fireside continued. There were about 30 or more persons there from all backgrounds. It was surely one of the most moving meetings I ever attended. They in turn gave us addresses of the friends in Iceland and there we met some remarkable pioneers including Max and Mona Bossi and Don Van Brunt.

I had a gap year before it was called that, and I had arranged to do a stint on a kibbutz in Israel. I spent the time squeezing chickens into boxes, clearing fields of rocks, and probably destroying a number of hundred-year-old olive trees. But before I left Cambridge for Israel, Mehran Nakhjavani, a friend of my brother’s at Cambridge University, invited me to stay with his family whilst I was in Israel. He didn’t say what his father did there – I assumed he was one of the office workers.

To Mehran’s father, Mr Ali Nakhjavani, I must have embodied so much that was wrong in the youth. I came from a family where my Persian grandfather was a devoted Bahá’í and here I was looking like a hippie and picking olives.

He took Mehran and me out for dinner one night and said how he envied us as we would see such changes in our lifetime that he could never have dreamed of. To hear a member of the Universal House of Justice say this to us was profound.

I left Israel in 1970 and began to attend firesides in Canterbury – the closest Bahá’í community at that time to my home in Maidstone. Tony and Anne McCarthy were gracious hosts. I had no questions but made up some to ‘show’ that I was a sincere seeker. After what I thought was a reasonable amount of time, I declared my faith in Bahá’u’lláh in their home.

In the year between school and University (1971) I had the bounty of going on extensive teaching trips to Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana, Lesotho and India. Before embarking on the first one I received a call from Charles Macdonald, Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly at that time, who invited me to meet him at the National Centre. I had only been a Bahá’í for a few months and I was now to embark on a three month ‘teaching trip’ to Africa. He asked how long I had been a Bahá’í and how much I knew about The Faith. I was beginning to think that it was not such a good idea when he said “Go and give the love of the Faith – the knowledge will come later”.

In Lesotho I travelled with a local travel teacher, Langa Shalpow.  In one village in the mountains we met the local priest. He told us a number of his parishioners had recently joined the Bahá’í Faith and he wanted to know what it was about. I had been reading books by William Sears and I gave my stumbling answers to his questions. After about an hour, this man of God who had served his church for decades, said that he believed that Christ indeed had returned.

That year brought many similar confirmations as I travelled to jungle villages in India or met some of the bushmen in Botswana. In Ghana, Hand of the Cause Mr Enoch Olinga and I were both staying at the Bahá’í Centre in Accra for a few days.  I would spin a coin with him to decide who should do the washing up. By the third night he burst into laughter and said, “You are cheating me – whether it comes up heads or tails – you always say you are the winner”!

In Nigeria I had the opportunity of going teaching with Hand of the Cause Dr Muhajir and Counsellor Samandari. Dr Muhajir tried – not very successfully – to teach me the prayer The Remover of Difficulties, in Arabic, as we entered a new village.

I returned to the UK at the end of the year to study Psychology at the University of Nottingham. There I met Morteza Youssef Abyaneh who is probably the best speaker on the Faith of anyone I have met. Our Bahá’í group at Nottingham was small but we tried to punch above our weight. A concert given by Fiona Dunn (later McDonald), Hushang Jahanpur and Adrian Burns was attended by 300 persons. The head of the Christian Union met me afterwards and asked how many Bahá’ís there were there. I wasn’t sure whether to tell him there were only four of us!

Each summer I had the wonderful opportunity of going on 10-week teaching trips to Nigeria, India and Guyana. By then I was looking for a place to pioneer.

Next I travelled to Glasgow to study for a Masters in Educational Psychology. What a community Glasgow was at that time (and no doubt still is). Andy McCafferty, Tony and Nadia McGuire, Mitra Sabet, Hooman Abrishamian, the Navai and Tahzib family – so, so many gems and so diverse – Tam Keenan and Rob Nocher the fireman – and, of course the colourful figure of one of the other local Bahá’ís Willie Nesbit (otherwise known as ‘Willie the Freak’) – all humankind were represented in these gatherings at the Tahzibs.

In 1976, at the end of my first year in Glasgow, I left for a 10-week teaching trip to Guyana along with Mitra Sabet, Shoreh Youssefian, Gita and Vafa Ram and fell in love with the country. In 10 weeks in Guyana the Bahá’í community in that country increased by 100% from 2,000 to 4,000.

I had to return to Scotland to finish my Masters. Soon after returning I met a seeker, Pamela McClurg, at the home of Andy McCafferty. Pamela has now been my rock in Guyana for the past 42 years.

Pam and I celebrated the first ‘official’ Bahá’í wedding in Scotland on 10 June 1978. The next morning a reporter from the ‘News of the World’ phoned me to ask how you get divorced in the Bahá’í Faith!

Ten days after the wedding I travelled to Guyana on my own in search of employment so that I could begin to ‘lay my bones’ as the Auxiliary Board member had suggested several years earlier. I met a key lady at the Ministry of Education who promised me a job after my first meeting. There followed 32 meetings over a tortuous 3-month period before she gave me the contract; 20 hours of teaching per week to 305 students at the Teacher training college.

Pam arrived early in the morning on her own at my college three months later– her telegram announcing her arrival never reached me. The students loved the spectacle of seeing me arrive at College on my bicycle only to be greeted by my wife on the college steps. To a people groomed on Indian movies, they could really relate to the scene.

So began four decades in Guyana. Pam and I had two sons, Liam born in 1981 and Cairan born in 1983. Liam earned his MBA and PMP. He was the coordinator at the Department of Works at the Bahá’í World Centre, and has now worked for 10 years in the oil industry in Houston. He is married with two children. Cairan has worked for UNICEF in Kosovo and currently works for UNICEF in New York. He is married with three children.

By 1992 Guyana had the highest percentage of persons as Bahá’ís for any mainland country in the world, 7%.

But it was also a troubled nation – the poorest country in the Americas with the sole exception of Haiti. The obsession for everyone was to leave the country by any means possible. Such has been the exodus that thousands and thousands of these Bahá’ís have left for New York and Toronto.

But as the numbers rose to 7%, a small group of the Bahá’ís in Guyana began to reflect on what the point was of more and more persons becoming Bahá’ís if nothing changed. At the same time, two UK doctors, Rustom Behesti and Farzin Rahmani, decided to come to Guyana at our invitation to help with the ‘development work’.

I was serving on the National Assembly at the time and we consulted on the best use of these two doctors. We decided to rent the biggest Convention Centre in the country. Somehow the Prime Minister heard of the plan and called the Centre to say he would speak at the meeting. As it was the Prime Minister making the offer, there was no debate about it. More than 300 persons attended the meeting organised for Rustom and Farzin. The Prime Minister got up, looked around and said “What is this? More than 300 persons here and for what – the visit by two doctors for 10 days?”  I was sitting at the back of the Convention Centre with other NSA members. We looked at each other accusingly about who leaked the invitation to the Prime Minister, but then he continued “but the Bahá’í community of Guyana has the potential to significantly influence the development of this country”.  Now the NSA members looked at each other again, each claiming the victory of inviting the PM! The banner headline in the newspaper the next day said that the “development plan by the Bahá’ís for Guyana” had been announced by the Head of State. Now it was just left to us to fill in the details.

There followed health, literacy, child labour, prison reform and youth leadership projects that reached to all corners of the country.

One of the projects was a Primary Health Care programme in the native Amerindian area on the border of Brazil. Dr Aidun, a Bahá’í, served this programme for years with total humility, dedication and distinction.On one trip I travelled for hours to a new village, and seated next to me was the young Community Health Worker. I asked her if she knew what the Bahá’í Faith was?  Her response; “No, but I love it.”

Twenty-two years ago I was on a UNICEF mission in Togoland when we visited the Bahá’í inspired school in the capital which was run by a Persian couple. This became our inspiration for starting School of the Nations in Guyana which has now grown to a community of 4,300 students from pre-school to MBAs and with partnerships with the Universities of Cambridge, London, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.

It has been a long journey at Nations but so, so many lives have been touched. But it has also been a journey with challenges. In a community of 4000+ inevitably there will be some very troubled persons. About a year ago we expelled a student for selling the drug Ecstasy in six schools. Neither he nor his father challenged the expulsion. But a student who had left Nations and Guyana more than 10 years before and had moved to Florida, took up the ‘cause’ on social media and declared he would blow up the school. Such was the power of his posts on social media that within four hours of the first post, 400 parents had gathered at the school for an impromptu meeting. Four hours later I returned home and was shot at three times by a young boy as I was about to enter my home. After the third shot he did a bizarre dance and fled. One bullet missed my head by less than an inch, a second passed through my right arm but the third shattered the bone, severing the artery in my left arm. Fourteen months and six operations later has left the hand paralyzed. We have had more than 35 media interviews on TV, radio and print, the articles being published in The Times in the UK, prominent papers in the USA and many times in Guyana. It turned out that the bizarre dance was from the vile video game ‘Fortnite’ that one does after killing someone. There is now a possibility that Ted Talks may use this story in one of their talks.

We read the messages about crisis and victory from The House of Justice but surely we don’t think it might play out so vividly in our own lives. Everyone we spoke to as we attended the surgeries at Mt Sinai Hospital in New York advised us not to go back, but it is our home and our time in Guyana has enriched our lives in ways we could never have expected. A few years ago our dearly loved Counsellor, Rebequa Murphy, told us at a very difficult time for us personally in Guyana ‘the harvest is yet to come.’ She was right – I think we are entering the harvest time.

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* Marion Jack (1866-1954) “immortal heroine,” “shining example to pioneers,” was an early Canadian Bahá’í who died at her pioneer post in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1954. She became a Bahá’í in Paris, and went on to teach English for a short time to the family of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Akká.

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Brian O’Toole

Guyana, May 2020

Brian with his family
Back L to R: Brian, Cairan, Lua, Liam
Front L to R: Pam, Declan, Theresa

I was very surprised to receive a call from the British High Commissioner in Guyana one morning asking me to come in and see him … but he could not tell me over the phone why. He then said I was to be given the MBE for services to education and development in Guyana. I attended the ceremony at Buckingham Palace along with my wife, my older son and my sister in law. Prince William engaged each of us as he presented the various awards – really quite a humbling experience.

Brian receiving the MBE from Prince William at Buckingham Palace, May 2019

Lockdown gave me the chance to pursue long-forgotten hobbies – like oil painting: