Students Share Foreign Experiences without Leaving Home

A mother in India, who only completed the 7th grade, said her daughter and son were in school, because she could embroider pillows to make money to send them to elementary school. How different that is, I thought, from most of the mothers in the United States who are well educated and do not have to pay to send their children to school. Yet, their children probably have similar experiences learning to read, to add and subtract, and to join playmates in games at recess.

     In the picture book, Mirror, by Jeanne Baker, city boys in Australia and farm boys in Morocco learn their lives are both similar and different. The earlier post, "Getting to Know You," tells how "Arthur," on his PBS show, learned a boy in Turkey did not live in a tent and ride to school on a camel. They both did a lot of the same things.

     It would be interesting and fun to ask students of all ages to describe the lives of children in France and China. How do they dress? What do they eat? How do they get to school? What games do they play? Then, it would be a challenge to find out if their ideas were correct. One resource that might help is epals.com.

     Once teachers sign up on epals.com, they can select countries, the ages of interested students from 3 to 19, what language to use, and even the size of classes. Their students can connect with classrooms in other countries to work on shared projects and begin pen pal exchanges.

     Contacts with foreign students prevent mistakes like a student of mine once made, when she asked a student from South Africa, if she had ever used a computer. 

Space-Searching International Team Sees Results

Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have found 150,000 stars with 4,706 planets casting a shadow, when they orbit past. The February 23, 2017, issue of Nature reported astronomer Michael Gillon at a Belgium university headed a team that used telescopes in Chile, Hawaii, South Africa, Morocco, Spain, and England to find the Trappist-1 solar system with a planet, Trappist-1e, that maintains a habitable temperature above freezing and below boiling as it orbits around its sun-like star.

     Light from stars is scattered and absorbed differently, if orbiting planets have an atmosphere with a chemical composition. Atmospheric gases, such as methane, oxygen, or carbon dioxide, signal the possibility of water and life. The Hubble Space Telescope has been able to tell what atmospheric gases from two of the Trappist-1 planets don't have, but the spectroscopes the James Webb Space Telescope will carry when it launches, possibly in October, 2018, will be capable of more atmospheric analysis.

All I Want for Christmas Is Seeds

Who knew elves occasionally take a break from making toys to store seeds in Santa's warehouse. Although many put Syria on their naughty lists, in October, 2015 the Svalbard global seed vault half way between the north pole and Norway responded to an urgent request from the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (Icarda) and sent the 128 crates of wheat, barley lentil, chickpea, fava bean, pea, and legume seeds Syria needed.

     After seeds for another 70,000 crops were added to the Global Seed Vault in 2018, Svalbard now stores 1,059,646 seeds. 

     Svalbard, known as the "Noah's Ark of seeds," is just one of the storehouses for the diversity of seeds needed to grow fruits, vegetables, and grains; the collections of plants, like apples and grapes, that are not cultivated from seeds; and even the genetic material essential to maintain the bees that pollinate many crops.

     Individual farmers also are essential in the process of ensuring a lasting food supply. On one of his "Parts Unknown" TV programs, David Bourdain found restaurant owners in the US South have been searching for the seeds that grew foods popular before the US Civil War. They located seeds that had come down through the families of former slaves, when war wiped out the seeds held by plantation owners. When kids start collecting and drying seeds for diverse crops, they also will be getting involved in the vital task of protecting the world's food supply.

 Why is the world's food supply in danger? There are many reasons:

• Wars destroy farms. Research stations in Lebanon and Morocco are working to produce seeds and saplings to resupply Syria's farmers.
• Globalization of agriculture has concentrated seed production in companies that abandon many plant varieties in order to produce uniform, high-yield varieties. (See the earlier post, "World (Food) Expo. Hybrid Crops & New Farming Practices.")
• Pests and diseases can wipe out crops. (See the earlier post, "The Bees and the Birds.")
• Global warming has reduced the area suitable for farming. (See the earlier post, "Coffee Prices Going Up; Allowances Going Down?")
• Farmers have moved to urban areas to find work.
• Without a market, farmers have stopped growing foods that have gone out of favor when diets shifted to wheat, rice, potatoes, maize, soybeans, and palm oil.
• Deforestation has removed forests where plants thrive and evolve.

Kids used to get oranges and apples in their Christmas stockings. To be sure these fruits continue to exist, the world is counting on Santa to bring these goodies along with toys and candy.

Look Beyond Africa's Current Woes

Falling commodity prices and a terrorist attack in Tunisia haven't prevented the private equity Abraaj Group's institutional investors, pension funds, and development finance institutions from making a total $1.37 billion investment, mainly in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Arif Naqvi, Abraaj's founder, sees middle class consumption doubling in the region between 2014 and 2024. Consequently, what the fund looks for is well-managed, mid-market businesses where the fund can influence strategy and growth in fields that benefit from the growing middle class. These fields include: healthcare, education, consumer goods and services, business services, materials, and logistics.

Remember when Lucy in the "Peanuts" cartoon said what she wanted as a gift was real estate. Grandparents might look beyond the latest toys and video games advertised on TV and give their grandchildren a stake in a fund with emerging market investments. It won't be a favorite gift now, but when the high costs of college and grad school come around, kids (and their parents) will be very grateful.