World Map Project! Bringing a Peace Corps tradition to my corner of Cameroon

This was my last and one of my favorite Peace Corps projects, at the Social/ Reintegration Center/Orphanage where I also worked on summer camps, taught songs and tofu-making, and loved to come on the weekends just to play. Creating a world map was harder (where are the borders, exactly?! what country does this island belong to? ) more time consuming (so many tiny countries! can i find a model map that doesn't still list Czechoslovakia?), and way more of a huge deal for opening kids' eyes to geography concepts ("the US is not in Europe?!" "Cameroon is that SMALL?!" how many countries are there?) than I anticipated : ) Total feel good group effort and lasting symbol of international friendship and connectedness.

Proud of their new map mural, on the inside wall of the large room where these kids eat all their meals, hold daily prayers, do homework, have dance parties, and hang out when it's pouring rain. Making these kids feel special, and showing them how working on something with dedication and pride can pay off, was such a joy.

It was a process! Luckily we caught an afternoon of uninterrupted power and got to trace the map on the wall instead of having to do a graphing system. Still, the old projector was all out of focus and the lines were about a quarter inch thick...made for some very fuzzy borders, literally. 

Progress! We started by color coding the biggest countries to make sure there would be variety. Elizabeth, furthest back, turned out to be one of our most dedicated and stable-handed painters. She quickly got permission to fill in the trickier little countries, for which her peers were jealous and respectful. It's fun discovering kids' hidden talents!

A perfect context for a lesson in mixing colors! Also a good reminder for myself : ) Paints come out and kids start to get interested..everyone wanted to help my paint right away, and I was torn between wanting it to be participatory and wanting to be in control of it turning out well!

It felt bizarre to estimate borders and know that I was imperfectly representing areas and intersections of land that have been fought over for generations and/or been huge sources of political and tribal controversy...the exact lines have been shaped by history, but I was shaping them with a wide brush and dripping paint.

Awesome teamwork! As far as funding, I used money from my Peace Corps allowance to purchase the paints and other materials...I felt torn about doing so for the image it might send about giving handouts, but to me it did not feel like that at all - this Center gave me so much on many levels, and it felt like a perfect parting gift. Plus, it was only around $20 total, and even at 5X that it would have been so worth it for what it brought the Center in pride, educational possibilities, excitement for the kids and a brightening up of their main space. I hope it lasts for years.

Before they could paint a country, the kids had to find it on my printed out map...many of them held it upside down and had no idea where to start in reading it. Once I helped them find it, they would quiz their peers and mock their geography ignorance, having learned it themselves five minutes earlier ; )

The names (in French) were a whole other saga, especially trying to find updated maps, deciding if the maps needed the countries' gender articles ("la" France? nope, no space!), getting South Sudan's size figured out, and finding tools thin enough to write clearly with. I finally sacrificed my eyebrow powder brush to paint the white names, it was much stiffer, and the vanity that led to me having it ended up saving the day.

My favorite last touches were the Peace Corps symbol and Cameroonian flag. This is a project that Peace Corps volunteers have done all around the world, and I am glad to have continued the awesome tradition.

I hope they think of the fun we had together over two years when they look at this map...we kept tracing the distance between our two countries, so now they know where I am...and where they are! Glad I was there for the painting, but that's just the beginning! So many cool educational uses of a world map still untouched, and I'm excited for the other area volunteers to use this map in future projects and camps here.