Happy August!

I really can't believe it's already August!  Only 3 1/2 months left of service and only 2 days til my birthday...the big 2-5! Yikes! 

After a fun weekend with my friend Monica here in Boaco, I took a trip up to Matagalpa to help Frank with his world map project.  He's been making two world maps at two different schools that he works at and I went up to lend him a hand.  We finished drawing one of the maps, and the other still is missing a few countries, but the drawing part is the hardest and the next step is for the students to paint.  I might try to see if I can go up there again to help supervise with that.  It's actually a really cool project because a lot of people, especially those living in rural areas, have never seen a map of the world before and don't have much of a concept of what lies beyond Nicaragua's borders.  I was happy to take part in creating this, although my part was very small.  It was still a cool opportunity and it was fun entertaining kids' questions about the map at recess.

Here are some pictures of the "finished" map (still needs to be painted):

The maps are 6' x 12' and I'm super proud of Frank for tackling this project since it is very tedious!  I wanted to quit after a few squares just because I felt like I was gonna mess it all up.  Part of the reason of why this looks so good, besides Frank's awesome drawing skills and attention to detail, is that this map comes with instructions for how to draw the grid, then each square shows what part of the country you need to draw in the corresponding square on the large map.  I felt like I was playing battleship while trying to find my parts to draw.  It wasn't as easy as I thought it was gonna be especially with the sun was beating down on us for a couple hours of the morning so I had to take a break to apply sunscreen.  As I crouched down to draw Antarctica, I almost just said "Forget it; they don't need to know about Antarctica!" but, I trudged through.

It was pretty cute watching the kids try to identify countries on the map.  They all immediately thought Nicaragua was in the middle (actually Africa), and then couldn't believe that Nicaragua was so small in comparison to the rest of the world.  I can't wait to see it complete and watch the students read the countries' names.