In his 2012 book Why Geography Matters More Than Ever, geographer Harm de Blij tells us how he uses maps in the university classroom: “As I suggest to my students, please scrutinize a full-page map for at least as long as it would take you to read a page of the book of which it is part. Try to summarize what it tells you, … Continue reading Mapping Monday: Maps are for Reading
refugee (rehf-yoo-GEE). n. person who flees their home, usually due to natural disaster or political upheaval. (National Geographic Education)
Refugees have no choice. You do. This is the message from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for World Refugee Day 2012, recognized today. Refugees are people who have had to make the difficult decision to leave their own country in order to guarantee their personal safety. For many of them, this means leaving their family, their homeland, and everything that is familiar to them.
Furthermore, an estimated 47 percent of refugees are under the age of 18. The video below documents the journey of Sudan’s “Lost Boys”. Almost an entire generation of Sudanese youth have resettled to the United States fleeing a civil war that ended in 2005.
The Lost Boys and refugees like them are just one category of people who must uproot their lives because they have no other choice. Refugees fall under the umbrella term of forcibly displaced people, those who have no option but to leave their homeland in order to survive. Other forcibly displaced people include asylum-seekers and internally displaced people (IDP’s).
Elizabeth Wolzak, an Instructional Designer for National Geographic Education, shared this map with our staff in honor of Geography Awareness Week. Elizabeth, whose parents are Dutch and American, was born in Guatemala and lived there until she was 19. Image courtesy Mapa En Relieve Guatemala. (From Fodors). “If you want to get the lay of the land before you head out to the country, this … Continue reading Blog:a-thon: Mapa en Relieve: Guatemala City
Anyone who is a self-described map geek–and we number many here at National Geographic Education–can cite some formative early experiences with maps, both real and imaginary. For me, it was the Candyland map, a delicious marriage of my fledgling passions for sugar and space. I used to love to manipulate my game piece through this colorful fantasyland of gumdrop mountains and lollypop woods.
For Frank Jacobs, it was a map of the mysterious world of J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and an incidental connection between the made-up Bree and his family’s ancestral home in the real-world Bree, in Belgium.
In the first installment of a new New York Times series called In Praise of Borders, Jacobs recounts his childhood experiences navigating Bree, in a curious corner of Europe’s German-Belgian-Dutch region shaped by a unique history. It is at once a personal yet relatable narrative.
