Today…choose to live life!

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.  – Max de Pree

We are trying now to get our focus back on the Learning Center as we continue to enjoy the successful experiences our Copey guests had in the United States. I invite all “Friends” to visit the Copey Learning Center Facebook link to see all of the photos of the students during their travels.  https://www.facebook.com/CopeyLC

At the Learning Center, we are now officially under the leadership of a new Executive Director, Ana Yancy Chinchilla. She has replaced Angela and has taken over the

responsibility of the Center’s day to day operations. By now, Angela is hard at work at a university in China teaching for a month. We wish her well and look forward to her safe return to Copey.

Ana has a Degree in Special Education and has worked as a teacher and administrator in English as a Second Language and Early Childhood Education for more than 10 years in nearby Santa Maria de Dota. Other points of interest include the fact Ana is a native of Costa Rica but has spent almost three years living in New Jersey. She is the proud mother of a five year old daughter, Abigail.

As many of you recall, annually we track the Learning Center’s performance during the yearly “Spelling Bee” contest. Last week’s results, during the first round called the Institutional Round,

the Learning Center won the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place spots for 5th/6th graders and won the top spot for the “Impromptu Speech”.  Next level of competition is called the “Circuit Level” and we await the results and will report them.

We congratulate our students on their success since it is one of several measurements used to determine the Learning Center’s progress. Did I mention that the “Spelling Bee” is students having to spell English words correctly?

Hopefully, we will get more current photos of this year’s winners and will keep track as we march towards the Regional and National championship rounds.

Now, to catch up on some trivia. About mid-June, this blog went past the 8,000 mark for visits.

You and I can be very proud of this yet another milestone as it indicates we are keeping pace with past 1,000 blog site visit milestones. The 7,000 milestone was reached in March. During the recent past, we have had visits from South Africa, Australia, Netherlands, Israel, Burma, Indonesia, Germany, and Romania to mention only a few of the more uncommon visits. “Friends of Copey” is seen worldwide!

I remind “Friends” how peculiar Blogging is. All Bloggers gain and lose followers over time because it is human nature for us to want to move on to something else of

interest…especially with this type of Blog. While some “Friends” move on, new “Friends” join in and the data shows that we have kept pace since the first year of this Blog. I regard all visits to this Blog very important whether it is a devoted and frequent follower or someone checking us out for the first time. We never know when that first time visitor will be someone who becomes a dedicated follower and “Friend”, or someone who becomes inspired to support us in the short-term, or someone who will be inspired to go out and “make a difference” for their own cause.  Much of our success is credited to our relationship with Kiwanis…a very worthy partner who is helping serve children not just in our neighborhoods, but in the world.

Finally, we are running ahead of the number of Blog visits this year compared to the past two years. We have a great chance to achieve our 2016 goal of a 10% increase in visits. Each “Friend” is needed to help achieve this goal by simply clicking on the weekly Posts to read the weekly news.  THANK YOU!