After four years of undergraduate courses focused on finance, I felt very prepared to take the next logical step of attending grad school with an eye toward working on Wall Street. I did not, however, feel prepared to enter the “real world,” and this realization caused me to evaluate the choices I had made that left me feeling bereft of any real life experience. So I scrapped the grad school plans and opted to pursue an opportunity to teach English in Honduras.

 

 

What would you do if your whole world was disappearing inch by inch… day by day… week by week… month by month… year by year? Would you try and save it? Would you tell others about it?

Would you resign to accepting fate, as many tell you to do?  

What if your life was not the only life in danger? What if your entire family’s lives were in danger?  What if the danger threatened your friends, neighbors, workmates lives, everyone you knew?

What if there were no way to stop the danger?

Whoever said it’s about the journey, not the destination has never traveled with my family. We get adventures, but not the kind you scream ‘yeah! Let’s do that again!’ If anything, you’re close to yelling ‘get me out of here!’ and not just because we want to escape each other.

My family could probably afford to stop and smell the roses and see the beauty of the journey, but some journeys should remain the road less traveled.

 

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Long before Richard Engel became NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent and won the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism, he was a special education student at New York’s Riverdale Country School struggling with dyslexia.

He once attacked one of his teachers by hitting her in the head with a xylophone. "The more I was coddled and made to feel like a person with a defect, the more angry I'd feel," he said.

Learning to read can help many adults overcome poverty and become self-sustaining, but in many countries it’s not a high policy priority. At the Shikharapur Community Learning Center in Kathmandu, the Family Literacy Program, developed with funding from UNESCO’s Capacity Development for Education for All (CapEFA) program, mothers and children learn to read together. In Nepal, 75.5 percent of men and 57.4 percent of women can read.

The most important thing any artist can have is the desire and hunger to create. This motivation gets you out the door, challenges you to learn new things, to go outside at ungodly hours of the day (or night) in all sorts of weather, to edit behind a computer for hours, and then to repeat it all over again. This month we travel to the West Coast of Canada through the lens of a person whose desire to create has seen him develop a stable of photography skills, and an impressive portfolio, through a few years of dedicated work.