Honduran Students, Carrying an Evolved World-View, See Beyond Borders
January 19th, 2010By Kirk Laughlin, Editorial Director
I wonder what it would feel like if educated people I met in nearby countries in this Hemisphere had no recognition of New England, the place where I was born and grew up. How would I feel if they looked at me as if New England – its seafaring history, the Tea Party and Native American Tribes - was 
pretty much irrelevant.
The group from Del Campo School in Tegucigalpa, Honduras
In meeting with several groups of high school and college students in Honduras last week, during a tour of the country’s growing global services industry, one of the first things we talked about was how much these students understood about the United States, its influence in Latin America and the model of democracy and transparency it represents. But as they talked about their own personal encounters with Americans, they uniformly described instances where people had no idea where Honduras was – or simply, that it was another stone-age third-world country that didn’t matter.
It’s surprising in a way that these students show little to no anger about this wide-gap in awareness. They are accepting of the way things really are, showing a maturity that is well beyond what you might expect from typical 16 and 17-year-old youths, all of which have Facebook accounts through which they often learn about the larger world beyond their borders. As highly fluent English-speakers, developed in most cases through English exposure and practice since age 5, these students talked openly about their personal hopes and the transformative dreams they have for Honduras, which in recent months has been a target of worldwide condemnation because of the coup to replace a president (Mel Zelaya) who was, according to countless Hondurans, moving the country down a dangerous path away from democracy.
