My newest project at school is a giant world map, approximately 15 feet by 8 feet that I am slowly and fairly tediously drawing out by hand. Before you start to wonder, yes, those two things making you go “wait a minute…” are still true. I am still very short (making those top 3 feet a little bit tricky) and I am still a very bad artist. But that’s okay, because where there’s a will for a low brain power yet high “oooh-ahh” factor…there’s a way.
Its done using the grid projection method, which most people experience for about 2 weeks in 6th grade, and then never have to worry about again. Basically, you have a picture. You draw a grid around that picture. Then you draw a much bigger grid somewhere else and transfer the small grid to the big grid box by box by box. In my case, 1,568 boxes over nearly 13 square meters. That’s a lot of boxes. The school staff thought so too, which is why the principal, deputy principal, and a significant portion of the teachers all spent most of their day standing around and watching me draw straight lines. It was apparently so exciting, in fact, that they also called the SGB chairperson, who immediately dropped whatever it was that he was doing to drive over to the school and stand in the crowd, crossing his arms and occasionally commenting on…something. I have never been so popular at school before.
We also spent a lot of time that day trying to find a way for me to draw all of the parts at the very top. Other volunteers have managed alright standing on a chair or a desk, however I had two fairly significant problems with this: 1) I am deathly afraid of heights. Standing on a rickety table on an uneven surface where every step or lean could send me plunging to my death from a horrific distance of 2 feet counts as heights. 2) I am so short that, even standing on that awful table, I could not actually reach the top of my latent map. So I had a problem.
The principal sent over the general worker (janitor) so that we could try and solve the problem together. Unfortunately, the general worker spoke exactly no English, and my hardware vocabulary set isn’t so good in siSwati. It turns out, for example, that the word for ladder is not in fact ‘iLadder’ (a technique that was based, of course, on the ‘el ladder-o’ theory of 8th grade Spanish/linguistics) but ma-steppa. It also turned out, once we made it past the language wall, that his ladder was a 12 foot high monstrosity made out of tied together tree branches that looked like it might come apart if I looked at it funny. Fortunately my siSwati for “There is no way in hell I’m getting near that thing, I will die instantly” has had some practice. (If you ever need it: “Anegke! Ngiyasaba!”) He agreed that it did look a teensy-bit unstable, but then had a really brilliant solution: Why don’t we just send a child up instead? (Perhaps on the theory that there are plenty of them and they are somehow expendable. I don’t know.) This was also not okay with me. I’m such a spoilsport.
Next somebody was sent for another ladder, but unfortunately it happened to be a stepladder roughly 2 inches shorter than the original table. By the end of it I was standing amidst the general worker, the principal, the deputy principal, the SGB chairperson, a teacher who really wanted to help, and somebody’s brother who has a truck and was therefore sent to get the step-stool ladder, waving my arms and trying to explain in two different languages that they shouldn’t worry about it, I’d figure it out, I’d come up with a solution, and while I applauded their commitment and appreciated how much they wanted to give me a hand, it would really be alright if they STOPPED HELPING. They were unconvinced.
In the end, I had to promise to make my very tall neighboring volunteer help me out over the weekend, and that we really truly, for honest, for reals would be okay without every ladder in the village. And then the next day Tom came over and helped me draw the top. I hate being short.
In all, the grid took about two days. Over the next few weeks I plan to transfer my small grid of world map onto my large wall grid of world map, and then magically come up with a map of the world that looks more or less like its supposed it. Then I’m gonna paint it. And then I’ll be remembered at Ekwenzeni Primary School forever – or at least until somebody decides to paint over it.
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