Thursday: On Thursday we did an activity about the Faces of Africa.

Friday: On Friday we did an activity of the different facts about Africa.

On Thursday Mr. Minkus had a slideshow of 22 different faces. He told us that we had to guess by the look of their faces if they were born in Africa  or not. I thought that it was hard to do this because Africa is huge, and their are many different colors of skin there. Also, not everyone who looks African was born there. There is a Dutch area in South Africa, so a lady had white skin, but was born in Africa. I learned from this that you cannot tell where someone was born just from their race. We did another activity by having to write down what we thought of when we heard the word Africa. Mr. Minkus put all the words together and we got to see which one comes up the most. Some of the words were, people, Africa, adoption, poor, food, and water. It was cool to see what everyone in the class thought of Africa.

On Friday we all got a card from a deck. Mr. Lowe would say for example, all cards from 1-8 stand. Then he would say a fact like, the people standing are the ones without access to water and the people sitting have access to water. This made me realize that there is a lot of stuff we don’t know about Africa. We need to find out more about the rest of the world and not just know about our comfort zone.

We got to interview people from other places that immigrated to the United States. Our group interviewed Miss Sulayman and Mrs. Hildebrand. Miss Sulayman is from Indonesia and Mrs. Hiledbrand is from Hong Kong. One of the stereotypes that the U.S. had about Indonesians is that they think that Indonesians are Asian. She said that when she first arrived at Calvin College, her roommate was guessing where she came from, and she guessed everywhere like Asia or China, but not Indonesia. This shows that the U.S. sometimes has wrong stereotypes about other people. She came here to go to college. She said that her family had always known that she was going to go to the U.S. for college. This shows that in Indonesia, they sometimes plan out that they will go to college from when they are children. Mrs. Hildebrand showed us pictures of Hong Kong and all the different foods and holidays. She told us that in China people are always grown up in the Buddha religion. There are many temples in Hong Kong. For Christmas, they light up buildings with many lights that say ‘Merry Christmas’ and other Christmas greetings. They have double decker busses that if you are on the top level, when you turn, one side of the bus tips. Mrs. Hildebrand said that it was really scary riding the top of the bus. It was very cool to get to interview people from other countries and learn more about other countries.