For the past two weeks, twenty students stayed after school to paint a 2x4m world map in the geography classroom. It was the first time for many of them to paint, or to find Africa on a world map.
In Malawi, colors are not clearly differentiated linguistically; blue roughly translates to "color of sky", green is "color of trees", red is "color of fire", but the nuances of shade aren't labeled, which strikes me as strange considering the vibrant variety of colors in clothing here. In any case, the students were fascinated by the process of mixing paint to make new colors for the map. "What color is this?" they would ask everytime we made a new combination. At the end of painting one day, I thoughtlessly started to toss out a few unused tablespoons of mixed paint when the students stopped me in horror. "That is waste!" Rebecca said, and began scooping the different colors into a small piece of a bag. The others helped her salvage the rest, and began mixing it together, until it formed a dull brown mass. "What color is this?" they asked, and excitedly painted their nails with the paint, happy to add "light brown" to their new rainbow vocabulary.
The project was also a much-needed refresher course for me on world geography. "Madam," one of the kids told me when we finished a big day of painting, "I learned something." I asked him what he learned. "I learned where Baffin Bay is." And so did I.
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