A man stood heartbroken in the middle of the village square asking everyone who passed by “have you seen my camel? he has a tuft of hair on his head and a white spots on his hind legs.” but no one had. The villagers took pity on him and offered to search the desert for his beloved camel.With high spirits they set out at dawn scouring the desert for the tufted camel. But, amongst the group there was a man with a closed suspicious mind, he whispered under his breath that he thought there was no camel, that the man was an attention seeker, that he was mad, that he was probably a thief. Slowly spreading his poison in any ear that would listen.

At midday they came across a camel by a pool and cheered but the man with the broken heart knew it was not his camel and the group trudged on. It was at dusk  when they crested a massive dune, despondent and weary and there below them was a great herd of wild camels . The man at once ran down crying with joy because there amongst the herd he saw his beloved camel. The villagers then realised that the man with the closed mind was missing. They found him with tears in his eyes next to a camel, with a shaking voice he told them “this is my camel, I didn’t know I had lost it, but he is mine”.

This week we began a  Superadobe course at CERES to create a dome for their “Dangerous” kids’ playground, as Stephan put it. Sheefteh started the first day with this sweet, funny story by Persian Poet Rumi. Her late father Nader Khalili had often begun his courses in the California desert that way, to remind us that sometimes if you are lost, you should help others on their journey to achieve their goals because whilst helping them you might find your own path. His “camel”, she said with a smile was to develop a fast and cheap, but also solid and beautiful building technique for disaster relief. It uses the materials you would have access to in a war zone, earth, sand bags and barbed wire to tie it all together and celebrates the inherent strength of domes and arches.