With the Duque Family

After our visit with Pete and Brenda McKinney we headed for Stone Mountain, GA to hang out with our great friends, Leonardo and Linda Duque. The Duques were next-door neighbors when we first started building our house in Villa Colón back in the early 1980's, and we've scarcely seen them again since that time.

They live in a woodsy and multi-flowered neighborhood filled with multi-cultural families in the greater metropolitan area near Atlanta. While Linda was still working at school (she has a job which she loves--as Spanish teacher to little kinder and first graders) Leo took us on a walking tour of their gorgeous neighborhood.
We enjoyed a nice afternoon catching up with Leo on all his amazing adventures from their previous life in Colombia where he was born. (After finishing the construction of their home next to ours they had to unexpectedly take off to tend to urgent family matters at home, so they've been living and working in Colombia for 20+ years.) Leo has been working with some of the Faith's highest power rural development organizers in Colombia and has written a couple of books about his experiences in this field (one of which I am now devouring--thanks, Leo!).

There is hope for this chaotic world! We were amazed to hear about the multitude of NGO's who are working quietly but constantly to organize the systematic order of the earth and rural peoples.

We really covered a lot of verbal territory during this two day visit. Here's Leo and Linda at dinner time:
That first evening we got to meet their daughter, Jazmin, now all grown up, and her Persian Baha'i husband, Siavash (sorry, I missed getting a good shot of him).

Also, Jason Ighani came over for the weekend from his studies and we had a terrific time with him and everybody.
Then, on the last morning of our visit, we got to go to the Baha'i Center for a devotional program. We were really stunned with all the beauty of this place (a previous church, very much like the one in Albuquerque--wood pews and all) and especially the rockin' Baha'i Community.

The lovely MOC, shown below introduced Kamal who's sitting in the front row.
We knew Kamal, previously Sinclair, as a tiny girl when her parents where pioneering to CR. Her older brother, Tony, was the fellow who turned Colin and our local Baha'i youth on to the dancing of the time--and who all later toured Central America with their show called "YA".

This lady knocked us all out with her charm and very precise and lively introductory talk. There were many first-time visitors to this gathering and they were pretty impressed. Many stayed over for coffee and snacks afterwards. At this gathering we took the names of several people who are planning trips to Costa Rica and have invited them to come and stay with us.

I taped the amazing Baha'i Choir which had the whole audience moving to the beat and spiritually uplifted as well to the Creative Words set to music. Unfortunately the clips are too long to upload to YouTube, but ask me about them and I'll be happy to share.