Hudak Hendrix is not your typical Bulloch Countian.
      Named after his father's Czechoslovakian friend, he has taught world history, advanced placement world history, and United States history at Statesboro High School for the past five years.
      His story starts after he got his degrees from Mercer and Georgia Southern Universities in the fields of history and secondary social studies education. He taught for four years at Tattnall Middle School.
      In 2001 he moved to Atlanta, and took a job working for an advertising company in the field of technical support. In 2005, he returned to Cobbtown to take care of his mother after his father passed away.
     He got a job teaching at Groves High School in Chatham County for one year, and then when a spot opened up at Statesboro High School he was hired to fill that position.
      Last year, Statesboro High was visited by special teacher teams from Indonesia in a program sponsored by the United States government and the Fulbright Foundation's International Leadership Education Program.
      This year, Hendrix was one of two teachers from Statesboro included with the group of American educators who were sent to the respective cities of those foreign educators who visited the U.S. The trip took some forty-four hours each way.
      Hendrix went to the city of Malang on the island of Java in the Indonesian Archipelago. When he arrived at the school, he was astonished to see that they had constructed a living suite for him inside the high school where he would be teaching for the better part of two weeks.
      Hendrix said “I was treated like a rock star. Everybody wanted to have me over for dinner. In addition, there was always security close by, to ensure that I had no problems.”
      The school, Hendrix said, had 3,000 students assigned to two shifts of classes: freshmen and sophomores came to school in the early morning and juniors and senior attended school in the late afternoon.
      The classrooms were 25-percent smaller than those at Statesboro High, but had 25-percent more students than in Statesboro. His suite was one of two spaces air-conditioned in the entire building complex, the other being as meeting room.
      In Malang they spoke both Indonesian and Javanese, in addition to English. Most of the time, the teachers and staff at the school wanted to practice their English on him, so understanding them was not as difficult as it could have been.
      Hendrix quickly learned that the Indonesian tradition of religious tolerance allows such different religions to co-exist within the same political and geographical boundaries. He said the Indonesian people were always extremely polite and considerate.
      The officials with whom he met, both political and religious, were always very clear about terrorists and terrorism: to them, the idea is wholly repugnant and those who commit those acts are themselves an abomination.