World Maps: DONE!

Well. I thought that out of the Big Three things I wanted to do during my last year here (SPA project, Maps, Teacher Training), that the maps would be the first things to get done.

They ended up taking 7 months of working on and off to complete. I got both of my other projects taken care of long before finally finishing off the maps.

Why so long? There just ended up being so much to do! And then re-do in a lot of cases! You start with a blank concrete wall. You have to sand it down, first, so it’s smooth. Then you can draw your grid of 1564 identical little squares. Then within those squares, you draw all the countries in the world, using the guide that has a world map superimposed on a grid, so all you have to do is draw each little curvy or straight line you see in each box. Then you have to outline your work in marker. And that’s the relatively easy part.

Then comes painting. Oh, the endless painting. Mixing colors, making mistakes, not covering well enough the first time, smudging other countries accidentally, having to mix colors again. I had to paint just about everything twice, in the end. Finally, after everything is painted to your liking, you have to re-outline the borders in marker, and then write the names of each country in Spanish on them, so that the map can be used daily by geography teachers and interested students.

I made a lot of mistakes doing the maps. Some of these were inevitable outcomes of the process, and learning how to do it. For instance, after it had taken a week to draw the first grid, I went out and borrowed an 8-foot-long level and finished the second grid I did in a morning. But some could have been avoided with better planning and communication. I feel like during this project, more than any other, I learned a lot about managing other people. Because to get everything done, you NEED help from other people. You have to get people excited, and committed, and then make sure they stay focused (if they’re schoolchildren especially!). One of the reasons they took me so long was that I didn’t always ask for help when I probably should have. I did a lot of things myself, fearing other people would either mess them up (schoolchildren) or be burdened by me asking them to help out (other volunteers).

This turned out not to be the case at all; while the kids couldn’t really wrap their minds around the grid drawing, they were fine painters, and hardly messed anything up at all in that stage. When Donna did her map in her site, she got the painting almost completely done in two days, because she had a team of like eight people helping out, who were all having fun doing it together. I was very glad that I got to help with hers! I'm also glad that her map took less than two months to complete, and looks just as good as either of the ones I helped with in Jalapa that dragged on forever.

I’m very proud of having helped on all three maps, and I hope they will be useful for years to come (the one last thing I have to do is apply a layer of varnish to protect them from all the hazards that go along with being located in a Nicaraguan classroom). I hope kids who look at them realize how big the world is, and how many places they could go. And hey, maybe some of them will actually go to a few they never thought they'd get to someday, just like I did.

For a complete illustrated history of the completion of the two Jalapa maps I was a part of, click here. Thanks again to all the PCVs (Diego, Lindsey, and Donna) PIEAT Volunteers (Karina, Annabel, and Gabe) and students who helped along the way!