Dear Friends,
Finals week began today, bringing with it a distinctive mix of apprehension, nostalgia and adolescent craziness. We are off to Siguatepeque early in July. Our team this year will include: Sally and I; Richard , Linda and Natalia Guevara- Grey; Marty Keil, her daughter, Morgan, and her friend Hayley Short; Peter and Elisabeth Englefield; and Becky Young . Our 160 XO3 android tablets are already in Honduras. We will meet with the Vice Minister of the Honduran Ministry of Education in Tegucigalpa soon after we land. We hope to secure WiFi for Owen Project schools, training for those teachers and technical support for all the existing XOs in Honduras. In order to expedite this, we must download a special digital curriculum created by the ministry onto the XO tablets and the existing laptops. This is quite exciting as it reveals our growing relationship with the national and local education authorities. Furthermore, this cooperation is in keeping with the vision of OLPC to empower isolated students by connecting them directly to the web and to revolutionize the accessibility of education for rural developing world communities. We will take tablets to 5 new schools and try to visit all the other 10 Owen Project schools. With WiFi access, we hope to establish sister-school relationships with our public schools in Seguin and those around Siguatepeque through skype and facetime. Thinking about the first 4 years of the Owen Project is to enter a world without spiritual inertia or friction, where our initial efforts to create and direct the project have created a momentum that has taken on a life and direction of its own. This is quite humbling and a confirmation of grace at work in the world.
More later,
Mark
theowenproject 