While we had travellers with us B6 did not continue his own travels around the world but now he is back on track. Since I last wrote about his trip he has left The Netherlands, made pizza in Italy, rafted and solved riddles in Uzbekistan and climbed mountains in Nepal. I was able to find a short dvd about Nepal which featured the local animals and their habitats. There were many books about climbing Mount Everest and the two I chose complimented each other nicely as one was about a couple of pigs who climbed and the other:Top of the World: Climbing Mount Everest by Steve Jenkins gave us many details about what an attempt at the summit involves.

Yesterday B6 received a letter in Chinese characters which he gathered meant that he should proceed to China next. I assured him that he should do just that, having no idea myself what the characters said (I found them in a brochure advertising paper). Once in China we read Children in China:an artist’s journey, and 8000 stones;a Chinese folktale. He has been very creative in filling out his travel journal; he draws, we have National Geographics that he cuts up and he adds flags and a sentence or two about what he has seen or done. Today he decided that he would like to add a little cat to some of the pages. The cat pops up here and there to ask the reader questions like, “Do you like skating?” or “Do you like pizza?”

This week at Group of Four we introduced each other to our sponsor children. Between us we have children in Mexico, Honduras, Bolivia and Nepal. Each family had begun a poster showing information about their child and his/her country. After we had shared these facts we broke up into groups to graph some of the statistics about these four countries and make comparisons with four wealthier countries.

We chose Canada, Australia, Germany and Italy because of the connections our families have with those countries. Graphs were made to display population density, life expectancy, percentage of population living below the poverty line, GDP per capita and infant mortality rates. The last two catergories were graphed together to show the inverse relationship of GDP to infant mortality.

Coming back together with our graphs each group explained what they had discovered while discussing and drawing their graphs and we talked about the impact these facts had on the countries’ need for aid. Even though we were looking at the big picture the children began to see how very privileged they are to live in a country where few die young, backyards are common, and the economy is healthy.