Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) Neil Armstrong was an American astronaut on Apollo 11, Gemini 8, and was the first human being to walk on the moon. He was also an aeronautical engineer, a naval aviator, a test pilot and a university professor. He exemplified great bravery in pushing the boundaries of space exploration. As with all risk takers, change makers, and peace makers, Armstrong was willing to go to the boundaries of prior human experience and push himself to go further into the unknown possibilities of human endeavor. Through doing so, he taught us all to imagine and reach for our limitless potential.

I was six years old when he set foot on the moon. As a young child, I dreamed that someday people would choose to live on the moon. When I was 25 years old, I lived and worked as an education volunteer in a rural mountain barrio of the Philippines without electricity or running water and lived in a bamboo house with a grass roof. When I told the young children I worked with about Neil Armstrong and his visit to the moon, they couldn’t believe it. “Did he take his ‘bawon’?” A bawon was a lunch of rice and fish wrapped in a banana leaf. The children could not imagine that people the world over did not eat what they ate for lunch each day. They could not imagine traveling anywhere if not by barefoot down the mountain trails. Just hearing the story about Neil Armstrong challenged their minds to think and to dream beyond the confines of their own worlds. Just as it has done for us all.