Painting the World

One of the great classic Peace Corps projects is a painted mural of the world. While the geography radio program the Ba Jotie and I have spent countless hours on delves deep into the history and culture of every nation on earth, not everyone knows where Turkmenistan is. To give the program a visual element, I am now spending my afternoons armed with a brush and paints.

To start the project, I needed to ask permission from the paramount chief and the headmistress at the school. A chief agreed to arrange an audience with the Gaanman, and a few days later I was summoned to the paramount chief’s house. Communicating formally through an intermediary, I stressed the importance of retaining local culture while learning about the world outside to better appreciate the context and diversity of where we live.

The language in which the labels of the world map would be written presented a cultural challenge. The Ndjuka take great pride in the Aucan language, but the school on which the map is painted requires the children to study in Dutch. After consulting an older Ndjuka friend, we determined to write the names in Dutch with the Aucan underneath and to paint a traditional timbae border as a cultural affirmation.

Having received permission from the chief to proceed, the headmistress and I found a prominent space on the front of one of the school buildings and visible even from the airstrip. Then I applied for funding. While Unicef was reluctant to fund my isolated project, with help from a friend at the organization, I modified my proposal to tie in with one of Unicef’s media projects, which expanded my own project’s scope and acquired full funding for the mural.

To draw the map, I drew a 28 X 56 grid of 1568 squares on the 9 X 18 foot space. The squares allowed me to follow a pattern in the manual to draw an accurate map by hand. At this point I realized that this project would take a lot of work. I needed to use a plumb line for nine vertical lines before I could use my yardstick to draw the small squares. The grid took seven hours to draw and the continent outline another seven hours.

Then the painting began. Work began at 1 PM, just after school so that the kids could participate as much as possible. The oceans and interior of the countries went very quickly, and the kids painted most of the area of the map, while I worked on the details, and of course, supervision. Watching to make sure certain kids took certain brush sizes and teaching them to wipe off excess paint after each dip in the can was key to avoiding uncharted islands or lakes from appearing at the unconscious whim of my helpers.

As usual, I ambitiously found a way to make the project a lot more work. Instead of painting each country solid colors, we are painting the interior of each country a tan color, with a colored border. This is so that the Diitabiki map can have rivers, mountains, and cities, rather than simply labeled countries, as most Peace Corps world maps have. Later on, in addition to the timbae border, another friend of mine will help me design a timbae north arrow in the corner, and I want to paint the flags of all the countries on the sides. While it has been a lot of work, I have enjoyed working on the mural in the afternoons. Hopefully it will serve as a beautiful landmark for the community for many years.