Atticus Henry was our presenter on Feb. 27th and spoke about his Six Weeks in Russia.
 
The eldest son of Peter Henry, Atticus is a junior at South.  This past summer, he spent six weeks in Russia through a National Security Initiative for Youth program.  The NSLI-Y is run by the State Department and the NSA with the purpose of helping youth learn languages that are important to our government (Russian, Chinese, etc).  It offers programs in 13 countries with 7 different languages.
Atticus’s six weeks were in Moscow, where he spent four hours a day in a classroom and lived with Russian host families on the weekends.  He explained that the Russian alphabet uses letters from the Cyrillic script while English is based on the Latin alphabet).  (Editor’s note – it looks like it would be very hard to learn).
 
Atticus was able to experience the Russian culture, touring with college students during the week and the host families on the weekends.  He visited companies, the state-run media, and churches which have been turned into museums.  An added bonus, he was able to enjoy Russia’s hosting of the soccer World Cup.