The Baha’i world is now on day twelve of the nineteen day fast. The one nineteenth of the year when we abstain from food and liquids while the sun is up. The other eighteen nineteenths are known to me as my love affair with lunch, arguably one of the three most important meals of the day. Today was the second time in my eight-year fasting career that I slept in and missed my chance to take breakfast, also among the three most important meals of the day. What better time than now to post the letter I wrote to my father during my first tropical fast from Yasothon in North-East Thailand in 2004? Through a freak publishing accident, it made to the Canadian Baha’i community’s newsletter magazine, making it the silliest thing ever to be in Baha’i Canada. Here it is, illustrated with pictures of delicious, refreshing and vandalized tropical fruit from my set of photos of food art.
This the most difficult fast I have ever done, Dad. I don’t think you can even begin to understand. You slobs in Canada just skip lunch for a few days, watching the sun shoot through the sky like a comet during your ninety-minute winter day. Days here are near never-ending, yours often-ending, ours endless, yours endfull. This day is a good example; by all indications it has not yet ended, and it does not plan to.
I want to cry but, alas, I can’t, for I am missing the vital, the wet ingredient to make tears, so little grains of salt just discharge from the sides of eyes. If you were to cut my arm off I wouldn’t even bleed, and I wouldn’t mind either because the pain might distract me from my thirst. My blood is so dry it has all become scab. It flows through my veins and arteries in the form of pellets, that roll and bounce through my oxygen-super-highways by way of gravity. I need to stand on my head every ten minutes when I start to become slow so that the pellets of blood will roll to my brain. If I’m too stupid to do it someone has to do it for me. I often regain intelligence to find myself being hung upside-down by a team of worried Thais.
I feel the same way an unfortunate African country must feel to be so chronically in debt that I may never recover. I scrounge some calories in the morning and totally use them within an hour of sunrise, so I borrow calories by eating the inner lining of my own stomach and other measures, putting myself into calorie-debt. My Fast-breaking meals are no more than feeble payments to the service the debt. I have done the math and the only way I can get back on my feet again is to eat a hamburger every hour for the next nineteen years after the fast is over and only drink, cook and bathe using pepsi.
I’m still not sure have begun to understand what it is that I am saying. Well, I hope you will think of me while on your skiing trip Dad, standing on my head and constantly eating processed meat for eternity. Please be careful while sliding down those mountains of cold precipitation.
Samuel Benoit 
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