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Show French Discover Hew Way ToTeachTffective Geography: West African Expedition Brings The Country To Student PARiS Probably the best way to learn the geography of a country is to live in it, but very few school-children ever have the chance to "go and see" for themselves what life is like beyond their city or village limits, lim-its, beyond the frontiers of ther countries, in the "strange and exotic" places described in their textbooks. The next best approach, a group of French teachers decided decid-ed last year, is to bring the country to the pupil. This was the motive behind a three-month expedition to French West Africa Af-rica sponsored last summer by the French Teaching League, and Jed by Pierre Rgurre, a teacher. The expedition bore results recently when the Leag'ue opened op-ened an exhibit in Paris showing show-ing the reality of life in a native na-tive village. More than 2000 school-children visited it in the first few days. A reduced scale model, in plaster, shows the village of Nere-Koro on the banks of the Niger river. Here the son of the Paris grocer, or the Boulogne Bou-logne factory worker, can see for himself how their brothers and sisters of another continent depend upon the life-giving river riv-er for their food, trade goods, and contacts with other villages and the world beyond. The village itself is dominated dominat-ed by a mosque (seven inches high in its reduced form) and dotted by small circular silos where the population stores its precious millet harvest. The dwellings in the village consist of 39 huts, with miniature minia-ture rafters jutting out of their sides to support their earthen roofs. In the center of the village vil-lage lies the communal pond where the population of Nere Koro obtains its drinking water. wa-ter. Fittingly enough, the plaster plas-ter model is dominated by the Niger river, which supplies the livelihood for nearly all of the village's working population. The . expedition, partially financed fi-nanced by the French Ministry of Education, collected its data on a trip from Dakar to Timbuc-tu, Timbuc-tu, the door to the Sahara desert. des-ert. It's members, who included photographers, movie cameramen, camera-men, a geography specialist, and a naturalist, first travelled by train and then transferred to a truck. They made, part of their trip in a native canoe, constructed of two hollowed-out logs sewn together. While aboard their canoe, they were caught by one of the 31 tornadoes they encountered en-countered during the rainy season sea-son and forgot about education for a night while they bailed to keep afloat. The display in Paris is of special interest to young students stu-dents because it shows them the tools of another society, which they can pick up and manipulate. manipu-late. Visitors . are particularly impressed by the "daba" a wooden-handled instrument of hammered iron which serves its users for everything from a pick to a plow. Another interesting sidelight on the life of another people is the exhibit's section on tribes still practicing fetishism. The expedition's cameraman took photographs of the tribal method meth-od of fortune-telling. This consists con-sists of tracing symbols and placing twigs in the sand, then sowing the sand with ground nuts. On the following morning, the seer looks at the tracks left by the animal who ate the nuts during the night and thus tells the future. Dr. Francois Corde, the expedition's ex-pedition's medical man, emphasized empha-sized that its members lived and travelled in native fashion to the greatest possible extent in French West Africa. |