How Big IS Africa?
We're having more and more contact with Africa these days. For instance, still another coworker of ours, Christine, has just been there – to Uganda – and Laura, a parishioner at my own church, left last week to spend her "junior year abroad" in Senegal. Christine went on a mission trip with a group from her church; they visited orphanages and she helped make a connection between one orphanage and a ministry for the blind run by Lions' Clubs. Laura is participating in a program on international development; all her coursework this semester will be in French. Laura's mom tells me the time difference between New York and Dakar is only five hours, the same as to London; that makes it seem less far away somehow. There are other close connections to Africa: we've written here recently about a coworker's visit in Ghana, you know that we met the Bishop of Botswana, and last March, Anglicans from around the world gathered for meetings in South Africa on the Millennium Development Goals.
Where are these places? All of this, plus all the recent, disturbing news about Kenya, prompted me to look at maps of Africa. Here are two. The first shows all the countries and gives you a good sense of its size and location relative to Europe. The second shows several large, familiar geographic regions superimposed on Africa. Now, can you get some sense of how really big it is and how widely varying? As seen in Map 2, Africa is about the same size as the US, China and Europe added together. It is the world's second largest continent, with 11,670,000 square miles constituting just over 20% of the earth's total landmass. The perimeter coastline is almost exactly 19,000 miles long. The "prime meridian", the base for all the clocks in the world, runs through several nations, especially Ghana, Mali and Algeria; Algeria itself uses the time zone that matches Continental Europe and is called WAT, West African Time, while the others use the familiar GMT.
We'll keep these maps close by; we'll surely want to refer to them from time to time. For the moment, here is a bit of information about the web sources where we found them. The first, very clear multicolor map showing all the countries is from the Books for Africa website: http://www.booksforafrica.org/. In conjunction with the online used book dealer Better World Books, Books for Africa distributes textbooks to schools in Africa; the organization will be 20 years old this year and has sent 18 million books to schools and libraries all over the Continent. The "double-image" map is from an elementary school curriculum guide, "How Big Is Africa?" designed and distributed by the African Studies Center at Boston University: http://www.bu.edu/africa/outreach/materials/handouts/howbig.html. Finally, some of our numerical information about size and time zones comes from http://www.worldatlas.com/.
Where are these places? All of this, plus all the recent, disturbing news about Kenya, prompted me to look at maps of Africa. Here are two. The first shows all the countries and gives you a good sense of its size and location relative to Europe. The second shows several large, familiar geographic regions superimposed on Africa. Now, can you get some sense of how really big it is and how widely varying? As seen in Map 2, Africa is about the same size as the US, China and Europe added together. It is the world's second largest continent, with 11,670,000 square miles constituting just over 20% of the earth's total landmass. The perimeter coastline is almost exactly 19,000 miles long. The "prime meridian", the base for all the clocks in the world, runs through several nations, especially Ghana, Mali and Algeria; Algeria itself uses the time zone that matches Continental Europe and is called WAT, West African Time, while the others use the familiar GMT.
We'll keep these maps close by; we'll surely want to refer to them from time to time. For the moment, here is a bit of information about the web sources where we found them. The first, very clear multicolor map showing all the countries is from the Books for Africa website: http://www.booksforafrica.org/. In conjunction with the online used book dealer Better World Books, Books for Africa distributes textbooks to schools in Africa; the organization will be 20 years old this year and has sent 18 million books to schools and libraries all over the Continent. The "double-image" map is from an elementary school curriculum guide, "How Big Is Africa?" designed and distributed by the African Studies Center at Boston University: http://www.bu.edu/africa/outreach/materials/handouts/howbig.html. Finally, some of our numerical information about size and time zones comes from http://www.worldatlas.com/.
posted by Carol S. | 1/27/2008 06:53:00 PM
1 Comments:
Great post! I actually work for Better World Books and wanted to share a coupon code and direct link to our website. The easiest thing to do so people don't forget the coupon code is to link them to http://www.xanga.com/jcupphoo. It's my old xanga blog that I just converted to house the most updated Coupon Codes. Help support literacy with every purchase!
Post a Comment
<< Home