5/6/09 Mapping the Northern Hemisphere

I recently got access to my friend Jamila's pictures, so I may be sprinkling blogs with old pictures for a while. :)

This one shows four of us working on the Northern Hemisphere of our biome mural map, about two months ago. (March 5th, I believe.) The mural itself is two meters tall, plus we had to start about a meter off the ground because of a small fountain (that's the grey thing at the bottom of the image), so to finish up, we had to be well off the ground.

From left to right:
Me, on a ladder, dotting in Alaska's islands; one of our partner-teachers on a chair, filling in Canada's Atlantic coast; Lahcen on a chair, finishing the chapparal around the Mediterranean Sea; and Fatima, on a ladder, working on the forests of central Asia.

One advantage of the chair-ladder requirement was that it limited the number of paintbrushes we could have on the map at any given time. The day before, I'd felt like the ringmaster of a three-ring circus: we had a swarm of kids all trying to fill in the southern hemisphere at the same time.

Oh, and did you notice that, in the picture, my hair is in a lopsided ponytail and I'm wearing two shirts with over-large sweatpants, with bulky things in the pockets, so it looks like I weigh about 200 pounds? Yeah, that's not accidental. On days when I know I'll be surrounded by hordes of teenagers - mostly boys - I do my best to dress as UNattractively as humanly possible. (The heavy rubber boots had more to do with the inches-deep mud than any fashion choice.)