A Tale of Two Sons
By Mike Tenbusch | April 13, 2021 Last week I received an email from Kevin Lopez, our team leader in Nicaragua, about Mateo, one of our scholarship students in Managua. One picture he sent of Mateo instantly reminded me of a picture taken years ago of my own...
Finding Light in Loss
Finding Light in Loss Presented in collaboration with the Catholic Foundation of Michigan By Mike Tenbusch | March 30, 2021In August of 1927, President Calvin Coolidge visited the construction site of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. While there, he...
What’s Causing “The COVID Conundrum?”
By Mike Tenbusch | March 11, 2021 There was a fascinating article by Siddhartha Mukherjee in the New Yorker last week about the wide divergence in how the pandemic has affected different nations. Some nations are continuing to show inexplicable resilience to the...
How Banana Bread Changed a Life—and Could Change Yours
By Mike Tenbusch | February 26, 2021 When she was in grade school, Racquel wanted to be a soldier when she grew up. In a few months, she will be graduating from Excelsior College in Jamaica with a dream of one day owning her own hotel. Her vastly different life...
What’s Missing in our Mission?
By Mike Tenbusch | February 12, 2021 Our international team and board discussing our mission over Zoom. Our team took this call from rooms in six different countries! Thank you, Tucker, for this photo. When you have a really good mission statement, I’ve learned...
A Life Lesson from Detroit
By Mike Tenbusch | January 29, 2021 Way back in 1973, I remember eating at Buddy’s pizza in Detroit with my brother, my dad, and my dad’s best friend, Fr. Frank Canfield, S.J. Because I was kind of a mischievous 4-year-old, I snuck a sip of my dad’s beer when he...
The Loss of a Precious Life
By Mike Tenbusch | January 15, 2021 We lost one of our scholars last week. Asdrubal Barroso was only 13-years-old. He was born in Cuba but moved with his parents to Nicaragua four years ago in search of better opportunities. They settled in a small home in Villa...
Water Is Life
By Mike Tenbusch | December 31, 2020 Have you ever lain in bed at night trying to figure out how to pay a bill? Only to fall asleep and keep waking up with that bill on your mind as the peace of sleep gets overtaken by the anger of insufficiency. It’s a horrible,...
What’s the Worst Problem You’ve had at Work?
By Mike Tenbusch | December 4, 2020 There are a couple of lessons I learned early in life, and each came at some pretty painful personal expense. The first is that you have to change the oil in your car, especially if your car is really old and leaks oil. I learned...
Keep On Getting Better
By Mike Tenbusch | November 19, 2020 One of the unique features of International Samaritan is the faithfulness of the families who have been giving to the mission—and leading it—since our inception over a quarter century ago. We have only had three board chairs in...
What Inspires Us to Good
By Mike Tenbusch | November 5, 2020 While we in the US wait patiently for election results, our friends across the world are confronting different challenges. Hurricane Eta has pummeled Nicaragua and Honduras since Tuesday afternoon. Driving rains and rising rivers...
Why Angelica Runs
By Mike Tenbusch | September 29, 2020 For over 12 years now, Angelica Cancinos has been the conscience of our work through her leadership of our Paso a Paso scholarship program in Guatemala. I met with her in Guatemala before taking this position, and the power of...
