My Home Town Children!
This past week was more than great as I spoke with a couple thousand elementary school children here in my home town of St. Paul. I started on Monday at Farnsworth Elementary where they have the aerospace technology and it was a great place to begin. All of the kids where so excited to put their hopes and dreams on paper with the thought of them going into space. The week was a full one with 9 schools and ended on Friday at Mississippi Elementary School where I was received again with open arms! I’ve asked all of the teachers to have the students letter of hope done and sent to be received before the end of March and that didn’t present a problem to any of them. That gives them 2 months and something exciting for the kids to do in school. I expect over 2,000 letters of hope before the end of March and then I’ve got the important part of my effort. To get all of those letters, along with those I’ve already received, scanned to disc.
These past 3 years have been full with my personal “hope” to gather the hopes of all the children I could reach and I believe my effort is worth more than words can tell. As I walked into these schools this past week and children would see me and say “Hi Gary”, gave me such a sense of belonging. A DVD was sent to all of the schools to let them know that I was coming and showing them a bit of my past effort when I was involved with the cancer research for more than 25 years. To be received with open arms by the children in my home town put a warmth in my heart that will never be erased. Though it was a full week with so much excitement it did bring some sadness. It marks the “end” of my effort to gather the hopes of those I could reach and marks a conclusion to my quest! Though I’ve still got much to do to have these letters scanned to disc and sent into space, I won’t have the chance to talk with the kids again and that’s hard to handle.
Washington D.C. has acknowledged that they have the ability to scanned all of my letters of hope to disc but I’m hoping to find someone here in Minnesota to do the job. For some reason I don’t want this hope to be sent beyond my grasp for fear of losing it. So I’ll be looking for someone local to help me with the job. I’m responsible for making sure the hopes of the children find their way onto disc and to send them elsewhere doesn’t set well with me. But we’ll see how things go.
I want to thank Lewis Scott who’s in charge of elementary education here in St. Paul, for allowing me the privilege of speaking with his kids this past week. For believed that the children are so important and making them a part of something special. I hope I did a good job Lewis to give your kids sense of worth and more.
I’ll be speaking with NASA over the next few weeks about our ability of taking the hopes of the children into space in the very near future. Knowing that a shuttle is scheduled to go to the International Space Station in September gives me a time frame but it will be left up to those with NASA when these hopes go up. So as I’ve said time and again,
Stay tuned ~~~~~~~~
