A few cute notes...

I brought back a baby wild animals calendar with me ($1 at Target) for 2010 and put it on the wall right by my front door. The picture for January is a lion cub and it even says in large letters- LION, which is the same word in French. So far, three people have seen it and asked if it's a picture of my dog from the states. Gets me every time.

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My dad bought me a blow-up globe to use with my geography club and we used it for the first time last week. While one boy went to the road to get it pumped full of air I taped my world map to the chalkboard. We started naming the continents and oceans. Most of them didn't know them, but atleast everyone could find Africa right in the center and had an idea of where the Americas and Asia sort of were. Well, in comes the globe. First, I had a little boy stand up and act as my 'sun' and I explained that the world was round and rotated around it. I ran around him and said...this is one year! They were full of oohs and ahhs.

The thing that really struck me however, was that once we started playing with the globe, they lost all sense of direction and location of the continents. We stood up in a circle and played a game where you name a continent or ocean, throw it to a friend, and they have to find it on the globe. They ended up turning the globe every which way and in some cases even had trouble finding Africa. It was amazing to see how working hands-on with a 3D object was really a new sort of experience for them. Given that their classrooms have no walls and no floors, of course they have no blocks or legos or balls to ever get them use to spatial reasoning. But it was fun to watch them have fun with it anyway and get so excited just to hold and touch it.

While I was home I found mini-globes in the $1 section of Target!!! I bought about 25 and I'm having my friend Ryan bring them over to Benin next month when he comes to visit. I can't wait!!!! Especially now that I see how much they are going to learn from them just by being able to take them home and play with them all on their own.

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We've all heard about the recent tragic earthquake in Haiti and even many Beninese people know about it from the TV. A lot of them think Haiti is in Africa though, maybe because they know it's French speaking and see darker colored people on TV. Anyway, another PCV said that people told him that lots of Beninese people in Cotonou and another big town of Bohicon are sleeping outside now because they think the earthquake is going to come here to Benin and they know they'll be safer outside. He explained it's far away, and they don't have to worry, and he even made the huge mistake of trying to get into plate tectonics. I told him he should have just told them the bad "gri gri" couldn't come this far :-).