What a wonderful experience for all of you, and what a wonderful idea for you to volunteer and "get your hands dirty" as you go along. I've been to several of the countries you are scheduled to travel to, and they are all wonderful, and have also not been to several, and look forward to visiting all of them sometime soon myself. I have to admit that I am totally jealous of the experience you are going to have, and I was thinking of asking you to adopt me! However, I doubt that you want a middle age man for a second child!

As I was reading all of the posts, and I realized that you lived in Germany, and not in the US as I originally ASSUMED (I know, bad to assume!), I was thinking that if you could add a 13th month, it should be somewhere in the US DEEP SOUTH or APPALACHIANS or OZARKS, etc. (or for that matter almost any mountain type "mini-culture") which is totally a world away from the US coasts and metro areas.

As one of the other posters suggested, I do hope that you blog, and I love it that you will have your son do a video report for his schooling every week. You might want to submit that to CNN "Ireports" or similar, and see if they would be interested in setting him up with a regular feature. What a great extra curricular activity that would be on a college application "weekly international features reporter on CNN at age 10" or similar. If not, you should certainly set him up with his own YouTube channel, because I am sure there would be other classes/students/schools who might be interested in his adventures. You might contact GLSEN to see if they would have some positive ideas to offer here too.

Have a fantastic time!