We are starting a new unit in which we are studying the continent of Africa. Our little unit started with all of us writing a paragraph with our thoughts and opinions on Africa, which were put into a website which showed the most commonly used words, not surprisingly the most commonly used word was ‘people’ but beyond that some odd ones were used. Anything from ‘poor’ to ‘beautiful’ was used to describe the continent, other words like ‘lion’, ‘giraffe’, and ‘elephants’ showed everyone’s love for a wilder more picturesque Africa and the term ‘HIV’ showed a darker picture. Some of the word choices were odd but I can’t say I was overly surprised at my classmates choices. What really shocked me was the following activity in which we had to guess by a person’s face and surroundings whether they were natively born in Africa, I saw such a huge diversity in all the faces, all the way from Indian to Dutch to caucasian to the stereotype of what every African looks like. Of course, I picture the States as pretty diverse but I have to say it falls in pale comparison to Africa. Imagine a city as diverse as Los Angeles lay out over 11.6 million square miles. We then looked at the fiscal differences in the continent. Going from rich and advanced countries like South Africa to much poorer, desolate countries like Somalia. Anyway that is the condensed versions of my reactions to our activities on Friday, I will continue with more on our Africa project as soon as possible.

P.S. I know its a tad late but congratulations to American Meb Keflezighi on his Boston Marathon win in which he beat the Africans and what a time to do it