Ready, set...

and go - actually, please stay and enjoy a serving of blog! Hello and welcome! Most of you who are reading this probably know me as Bryant. Others of you may know me as Mr. Evans, or by various nicknames such as B.T., French Fry, or Pierogi. Regardless of whether you are a friend, a partner, a family member, a colleague, a student, an acquaintance, or even if we don’t know each other from Adam, I'm glad you are here and want to say “thanks” for logging in.

Over the next several weeks, I will be embarking on a journey to Argentina and Uruguay thanks to the Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad Program. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, these seminars are designed to help establish cross-cultural understanding between citizens from the U.S. and other countries from around the world. The Fulbright Program as a whole started in 1946 and was named after an enlightened senator from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, who believed that “the rapprochement of peoples is only possible when differences of culture and outlook are respected and appreciated rather than feared and condemned, when the common bond of human dignity is recognized as the essential bond for a peaceful world.”

Each year, the Fulbright-Hays program holds roughly seven to ten travel seminars with fourteen to sixteen participants in each seminar. During the four to six week seminar, teachers and others involved with education develop curriculum ideas and projects that can ultimately be taken back to their classrooms and communities. Here’s a link for Fulbright-Hays if you’d like to check it out: www.ed.gov/programs/iegpssap/sapfacts.html

I applied for the Fulbright Hays fellowship last October. There were five seminar choices available to secondary/postsecondary instructors for 2006, including Argentina and Uruguay, China, Hungary, Jordan, and Mexico. In my application, I was able to identify my top three choices in seminars should I be accepted. In late March of this year, I received a wonderful letter notifying me that I had been accepted to participate in the Argentina and Uruguay seminar. Getting accepted was very exciting, but the icing on the cake was getting my #1 choice!

So, exactly one week from today, this odyssey will officially begin. It will start out in Washington, DC, where we will have a 3 day pre-departure orientation. It is at this time that I’ll be meeting 15 fellow instructors from around the U.S. who will also be participating in this travel seminar. On July 1st, we’ll fly to Buenos Aires and we'll spend the next three weeks traveling throughout Argentina. Then, we will spend the last couple of weeks of our journey in Uruguay.

All told, the seminar will last 35 days and will cover 73 degrees of latitude from the northernmost point of Washington, D.C. to the southernmost point of Montevideo, Uruguay. Thanks again for being a travel companion on this adventure. I’ll post when I have a chance and will try to include pictures of the places we go so that you won’t be completely subjected to my writings! Until the next time, happy trails…