GREAT TEACHERS FOR LIFE

Master grade Macross Frontier VF-25F model on display - “Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.”

I met a great teacher. She lived in a small Costa Rican village where my family vacationed. She was no formal educator, philosopher or person of any renown. Actually, she made chocolate to sell to tourists.

She took us into her small home. It consisted of a single, partitioned room with a dirt floor and a wood-burning stove. Its paneless windows were open to an encroaching jungle that surrounded the dwelling. This house, by my North American standards, might not be considered more than a shack or a hut. Yet it was home to a warm and happy family of four.

She showed us how she picks the cocoa beans from her porch, crushes them, boils them in a paste, adds sugar and other ingredients and finally produces chocolate. We sampled chocolate candies, bananas and other native fruit picked from the jungle.

She not only invited us into her home, but into her life. And for a couple of hours, she allowed these strangers a glimpse into her world.

Here was a person who had no TV, no computer, no washer and drier, no microwave oven, no automobile...no floor!...and none of the conveniences of my daily life. I saw no books or magazines and presumed that only her children (two lovely teenaged girls, home that day from school) could read and write. Yet this woman taught me so much. And if I could have stayed longer, I would have learned more - about her life, her world, her culture and her ideas.

Who are not teachers? Who are so humble or so uneducated, so young or so old, or so deficient in some way - that we cannot learn from them? If we only take time to listen, who cannot tell us of things we have never imagined?

Someone advised, "Live each day as if it were your last; learn as if you were to live forever." And it's so easy when we discover that, in some way, everyone is a great teacher.

From Lifesupport.

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