Thank you to all of our Archdiocese of Cincinnati hosts, who will be welcoming  eight educators from the Holy Land including Israel, Palestine and Jordan.

On behalf of HOPE (Holy Land Outreach Promoting Education), I would like to personally extend a warm welcome to the educators from the Holy Land: Fr. Faysal Hijazen, Saad Rahhal, Suha Haddadin, Waseim Kasabry, Marina Hanhan, Ghada Kawwa’, Nadia Toffaha and Wafa Qzaih, who will be joining our HOPE Program. We are looking forward to seeing them in just one week.

We have learned that you are concerned about the same issues as we are in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. We both want to make a difference in the classroom by meeting the individual needs of children and sowing the seeds of hope and peace,

HOPE is often referred to as “God’s Project,” as it cares about you and the children you teach. As you work in solidarity with our teachers from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, you will see the face of God reflected in each other.

Besides working with our Archdiocesan teachers, many of whom will be your hosts, you will be meeting Bishop Binzer; Dr. Mike Gable, Mission Director for the Archdiocese, Fr. Tom Wray and others from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. You will also meet professors from the University of Cincinnati and you will be participating in a two-day in-service called Talents Unlimited that will be combined with instructional technology. We are thrilled that the Director of Talents Unlimited, Kelly Lomax, will be coming from Mobile, Alabama to be the instructor and she will be joined by Joe Gaston, who is an expert in instructional technology.

Talents Unlimited is a thinking skills program that teaches how to think and not what to think. Fr. Faysal, Superintendent of the Latin Patriarchate schools in Israel and Palestine, has described Talents as “A method that allows the students to acquire the potential to interact with the skill of thinking to limits beyond cognition to solve problems and make important decisions.”

One of the things we have learned over the past five years is how hard it is to share teaching strategies with a seven hour difference in time. However, we hope by pairing LP/AOC teachers and technology instructors, we will be able to create our own website that will be devoted to sharing educational strategies, lesson plans and ideas for the benefit of “our” students.

We are praying for a safe journey for you and a faith-filled educational experience while you are with us.

God Bless each of you as together we build a bridge of HOPE through education.

Love, Peace and HOPE,

Nancy Hemminger, HOPE President