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MUD BY ANY OTHER NAME… Before leaving the remote village where we had arrived after a half-hour motor-boat ride across a placid coastal lake and a pleasant, spirit-inspiring, forty-five minute journey in a dugout canoe through acres of mangrove trees, my hosts asked me if I wanted to borrow a pair of rubber boots as we continued on our way to visit a farmer who was planting nitrogen fixing trees on his small plot on the Atlantic Coast of Honduras.  “There will be mud along the way”, they said.
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THE HATFIELDS AND THE MCCOYS I was getting ready for a trip to a project region in the south central Department of Olancho in Honduras, but there was some doubt whether conditions in the zone would allow for a safe journey back along the country roads leading to the isolated communities that were participating in the project.  There was talk of increased violence in the region; not that violence was something unheard of in these rural, frontier environments, but over the last year the level of reported deaths in the department (not by automobile accidents or natural causes) had risen to a point where additional safety considerations and analysis were needed.  The news coming out of the area consisted of a too-often vague and mixed up tale of gang rivalries, drug trafficking wars and/or family feuds.  It all seemed just too jumbled up to make sense.  But, by talking to staff of our local partner organization, I was finally able to piece together at least part of ...
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Reflections on Hair I am about to cut all the hair on my head and shave off all of my facial hair. It started as a simple fund raising idea for the organization I work for.  In a gambit to raise a minimum of $1500 from friends and family, I foolishly promised that I would let myself be subjected to a Kojak-like do-over if it happened.  And it did.  For those of you who might not know who the 1970’s TV character Kojak was, he was a detective.  A bald detective.  A lollipop sucking bald detective.  And I will soon be like him. Well, maybe not the lollipop part. But first, before I submit to a public shearing, I feel the need to reflect back over all the different manifestations my hair and I have gone through over the years. When I was between the ages of 3 to 12 years, I didn’t know that there was any kind of haircut other than the flattop.  It was an uncomplicated thing:  you went to the corner barber shop, sat in the hydraulic chair ...
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