Africa is Not a Country, Redux

Last January, author Margy Burns Knight and I spent a week-long residency at Fiske Elementary School in Lexington, MA, where we led 400+ students in the creation of a book about their daily life, entitled Our Corner of the World. With the help of the faculty, staff, and parents (especially Cynthia Wimer and Songyi Kim!), each class participated in writing the text, I illustrated their stories in full color, and each student contributed a b&w spot drawing. The book was printed and every student received a personal copy.

Our Corner of the World was a response to our own book, Africa is Not a Country, written by Mark Melnicove and Margy and illustrated by me, about the daily lives of children in 25 of Africa's countries (then 53, now 54, since the Republic of South Sudan became a nation on July 9, 2011).

Market in Benin, illustration from Africa is Not a Country

Since the completion of the Fiske book, the two books have been sent, through people who had personal connections with schools, to students in seven African countries: Uganda, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Tanzania, Benin, Kenya, and Zambia. Here's the book being delivered to the head of a school in the rural community of Simikanka, Zambia:

Lest anyone think the book and the information is no longer needed, here's a teabag my brother found last month and passed on to me:













For a closeup:


(This from a tea company in the nation that colonized a number of Africa's countries!)

For more on the book and the topic, see the inaugural post of this blog, as well as this one about how the book was created, and this one about programs Margy and I do in schools.