Mrs Figdore Is Back!!
Mrs. Figdore has come back to visit us and talk about the places she visited. One of the places she discussed was New Guinea, which is in the South Pacific Ocean. In New Guinea younger children do not wear any clothes because it is very hot and the people are too poor to buy any. Americans help them out by donating clothing to them. The babies do not wear diapers like we know diapers. They use towels as their version of diapers, which they usually use over and over again. The children use bamboo sticks to make music and they make instruments from palm leaves, which are either shaken or hit. They use these to put on shows when guests come to the island. They make some of the clothes from palm leaves when they are going to have celebrations. While Mrs. Figdore was there the principal of a Kindergarten class asked if the children could visit on the ship. While they were there they saw ice cubes and coca cola for the first time. No one drank it because they were afraid of it. While there, she visited lots of other South Pacific Islands which were very much the same. In some of the schools in the islands they wore uniforms. On some of the islands she saw men called “firewalkers”. Those people were not as poor as most of the other people because visitors pay to watch them walk across fire.
The second place Mrs. Figdore discussed with us was Nibia, which is in Africa. There she saw lots of babies under umbrellas to protect their skin against the glaring sun. She told us about Coconut Crabs, which are crabs that eat coconuts. They are very, very large. The people there eat the Coconut Crabs. They grew a vegetable garden outside the village. When they harvest the vegetables they carried them on the back of their heads so they could keep their hands free. Traditionally, the mother teaches her children how to this. Married women put mud on their braids to keep them in place.
She also visited Baja Beach in Mexico. This is mostly a desert island, with lots of sand. They watched a small boy who had made toy of nothing but tubing and string. They do not have things like video games and must make their own fun.
Mrs. Figdore also visited a village in the Amazon. The village was flooded during that time. The water was so deep it almost went into their houses and they had to leave their houses by canoe. They even used the canoe to get their food. While she was there she saw a young boy who got a Coati, which is a relative to the anteater and racoon.
Another place she visited was Viet Nam where she saw Vietnamese students visiting the post office for a field trip. Everyone in Viet Nam rides motorbikes for transportation, which can be very dangerous.
In Cambodia she saw children weaving mats that are sold to tourists and other places in the world. The children wanted to be paid for having their pictures taken by the tourists. They could not use any money with wrinkles or tears in it. This got very expensive for Mrs. Figdore when the word got out that she was paying for the photos. In Cambodia there are no refrigerators or ice so mothers have to go shopping every day for food.
These are facts about the places Mrs. Figdore visited. We found her trips very interesting to all of us. She made us want to travel to lots of foreign countries.
