Greetings Friends
Our old site at Posterous.Com is no longer in operation. Evidently, Posterous was purchased by Twitter. I have transferred all the blogs from years past to this site. I had thought to begin blogging for this year’s trip last December. We were unexpectedly successful in our fund-raising and were able to order the XOs on December 21st. This was near the end of the advent season, and since my thoughts were beginning to turn to next summer in Honduras ,this seemed a perfect time to begin posting. As you can see, this did not come about. I’ve started in a new teaching position at our local high school. My field is World History. High School students are just as self-absorbed and future-oriented as I remember from my own adolescence. This does not bode well for lessons on the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism or ideas contained in The Communist Manifesto. In addition to the challenge of inspiring media-saturated sophomores, I have noticed a subtle change in myself: I have been overwhelmed by memories of my own high school years. Spring is already well advanced in Texas and I have a serious case of Spring fever, which has led to the rediscovery of the poets of my youth- Wordsworth, Frost, Tu Fu and Li Po. We’ll see how this plays out in Siguatepeque.
We leave for Honduras on June 16th and will stay at the Zari in Siguatepeque until the 27th. The Ministry of Education has chosen 4 new schools that are even farther into the mountains to the northeast of Siguatepeque towards the lake district. This will mean some long jeep rides with spectacular scenery. Every school we have ever visited in rural Honduras seems to have been placed with an artist’s eye for beauty and vantage point.Unfortunately, the XOs we ordered in December may not be in country when we arrive ,despite our early order date. Next Fall we will order before Thanksgiving to try again to have them there when our team visits the new schools. We will have to borrow XOs from earlier deployments to use as teaching models. We will also try to recruit Honduran teachers already familiar with the XOs to help us in the new schools. This year our team will be a bit smaller. Illness and family commitments have lessened our numbers to 7. We will have two students with us, one newly-graduated from High School, the other a college freshman. We hope to include more young people in the future. More later.
With anticipation, Mark
theowenproject 