What week?

Life is slowly returning to normal I think. The evidence is that I can go from Monday to Saturday without realizing where the time went and wondering how I might possibly get more of it.
I’m involved in a project at work that is keeping me incredibly busy. Our council president (my boss’s boss) is pushing what he calls the “older boy initiative”. It involves a multi-faceted effort to improve the numbers of Varsity Scouts and Venturers who are participating in a quality program. “Quality” is the operative word here. Because the quality of most of the programs for 14-18 year olds in the council is so pitifully poor, no one wants to participate in them. We are trying, through increased support through roundtables and training courses for the adults who have been recruited to work with these boys, to improve the program that gets delivered to the kids themselves. Then, we want the boys to participate in a challenging, quality high adventure experience each summer—something significant enough to qualify for a “rite of passage”.
That’s where my involvement comes in: I’m the High Adventure Director in the council. I was supposed to spend last summer focusing on the programs our camps are offering to older boys so I could intelligently modify them to meet the new standards we’re coming up with. Of course I was famously incommunicado last summer so I’m playing catch-up with that assignment along with all my other jobs.
Dave, the council president, is a PhD in education theory; he knows how people learn. It’s been fun working with him and I think it will just continue to get better as we progress in this project. I’m getting to participate in something that, if we are really successful in pulling off, will move the world. At least as far as the reach of the kids who will benefit from the programs we come up with. And I know myself how far one person’s reach can go if you really get a chance to measure all the chance meetings and how they themselves ripple out and can literally go all over the world.
It’s another example of the theme I chose for this web log. If I hadn’t “chanced” on working for the Boy Scouts when other dreams seemed impractical to follow, I’d never have gotten involved in something like this that has the promise of real fulfillment and satisfaction, besides being personally beneficial.
Hiking and saving the world. What a combination for a wandering poet like myself!