09/04/10

Happy birthday Buck! I can’t believe my baby brother turned 17.
Yesterday I received a map of the world in one of my six packages. After “laminating” it with clear packaging tape, because the word “gentle” doesn’t exist in Mozambique, I brought it into my Life Group class today. It was a huge hit. For a lot of them it was probably one of the firs times in their life they had seen a map, and I am sure nobody had ever let them get right up against it and touch it before. We talked about the 5 continents (still weird for me), the equator, Africa and Mozambique, and Portugal and how Portuguese is spoken in Angola, Brazil, and Mozambique because of people coming from Portugal to colonize those areas. Afterwards I just let the kids look at the map and some of them really got into it, pointing out to each other the countries they knew and finding the map of Mozambique out of all the world’s maps at the bottom of the map. One girl was helping me carry the map as I walked from one classroom to another and she asked me what the lists on the back were for. I showed her how, if you didn’t know where on the map a country was, you could find country on the list and then use the coordinates, for example, Mozambique is in box H-11, to find it on the map. She thought this was incredible and began to excitedly show other kids how to do that and they were soon trying to find all sorts of countries.