Thursday, February 28, 2008

Back from a Three-Week Hiatus

Monkeys in Costa Rica, colonial architecture in Nicaragua, snow in New York

After a two-week adventure in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, followed by a one-week visit to New York, I am finally back! It was an amazing trip and a wonderful experience. I will be posting photos and entries of the cities and parks we visited as soon as I can. While in the Big Apple, I was able to see a lot of my family and friends. It also snowed while I was there! It was fantastic!

Back here in Puerto Rico, as I resumed my early-morning runs, I came across the teacher's strike. There is a public high school right across the University of Puerto Rico's athletic field, where I go running, and there were quite a few police officers and protesters gathered at the school's entrance. For almost a week, thousands of public school students have been unable to attend classes due to the strike. The governor is now seeking court action to force all teachers to go back to work. Shouldn't he have done this earlier? Most who attend public schools in Puerto Rico come from low-income families. This teacher's strike, which does not affect private schools, is yet another reason why there is such a huge gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Access to a good education should be available for all. There is obviously something awfully wrong with the way the government is handling this situation. Education is the key to a brighter future. We all lose when the education system in our respective countries fail to do an adequate job in educating its population.

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