Children

As there is still seven weeks to go until I leave the UK I thought I would experiment by adding things that interest me.  Here is one of my favourite extracts from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese poet.

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable."

A beginning

This is the first entry in my new blog.  For those who don't know me, my name is Stuart Lonsdale and I am a retired teacher from Pontefract in the UK.  I am travelling this September to Pangani in Tanzania to help for three months at Boza Technical Secondary School and have decided to do a blog to let my friends at home know how the journey is going. Hopefully the rest of the blog will be more interesting than this first entry but that depends on many things beyond my control.