Pine Ridge, SD: building a Baha’i gathering place.

Beloved friends,   I just had to share our happy news. Over the years we were able to have our Jr. Youth classes, children classes at my home. But for almost over a year my husbands lack of health and a few other things has made that very hard. You know that my husband is one of the founders of Oceti Wakan, who’s mission is the preservation of Lakota culture and language. He and his father have had a vision of a cultural/education/healing center for the past forty years. We were able to develop the design for the dream but the cost would have been close to 1.5 million. When a doctor from National Institutes of Health got involved with our dream, he was able to talk us into doing a double wide trailer to start a wellness center which brought the cost down to a few hundred thousand. He and a young man in Poland loved the idea so much both gave us the funds to start to develop the funds, with all that we are doing developing our life skills curriculum have had no success. The tribes’s addiction program contacted us to start a prevention program based on our prevention curriculum with our successful Jr.Youth group and more. They had us make a budget and wanted us to start in May.

But even though we have been studying Ruhi and getting a small group of Lakota’s ready to teach our Jr.Youth group and I would be able to pay them to do our prevention group, we still had no place that we could count on to do this in.

We decided after looking for used trailers for months, any kind of a building to build what we could afford with the idea that we would just add on as we got more funds. Below is the picture of, our crew is calling it the ‘little school room’, the first step of our Wellness Center. The focus will be our prevention classes and our Jr. Youth group classes to begin with. It’s only 16’ x 20’ but I think we will be able to add on a deck. And the good news is that we will be able to begin sometime in May.