:”( G is for Geography..sniff, sniff

State of day. I’m so sorry. Mostly for myself. I missed a day in the A to Z challenge and I am probably officially disqualified by now, but at least it wasn’t due to laziness. I had my post ready to publish but then my clumsiness got in and I broke my brothers Wi-Fi and had no other way to connect to the internet.

I got really upset, and I mean depressed upset, it was very late at night anyway, it was a long day and many other things contributed but this, missing the challenge was the last straw. Today I woke up with swelling eyes.

Ah well. I’ll be posting the H separately so I can say later that I posted twice a day. :)

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Geography has always been a favorite subject of mine and I was good at it. studying geography  was as near as it could get to reading a storybook, I would dive into other people's cultures, lives and languages. I loved romantic and difficult city names, I dreamt of visiting all the beautiful exotic places, I brought me a world Atlas and was ahead of many of my classmates (and got me some nice remarks from my high school teacher).

I remember the 98 world cup magazine (that I still have) and how they described every participating country's team with all the information that could fit in one page. That was like a gift. It’s football players names that gave me a sense of names’ origin and provided me with a fine storage. Of course all that came in handy to the writer me.

I remember managing to differentiate between Japanese and Korean names. That was something. I amazed my brothers, especially Robobro. 

I even took geography for my first year in college.

My geography teachers were generally always good. But in the third year in intermediate school my teacher was ablah Mufidah (ablah meaning female teacher in KSA, also used in Eygpt. In Sudan we say ‘Ustatha’ for women and ‘Ustath’ for men teachers and both are correct Arabic. if the Sudanese colloquial sounds more ‘ustaza’ and ‘ustaz’)

Okay we’re done with that.

Ablah Mufidah was a great teacher, she was short and very organized, something about her seemed military. She always wore a small smile on her face, and her clothes were mostly in tamed colors. She may seem stern to lookers but the truth is she was an easygoing person with her, well, times of quirkiness.

what makes her stand out was that she was a true lover of geography, she used to bring us items from each country she describes. When she taught us about India she brought us a rupee note, I don’t recall how much it was but what was amazing is that she showed us how on this piece of paper the 15 official languages of India were written in a small column  Fifteen official languages! Because you see there are other languages. I was in Awe! Literary.

I need to go to India…I just have too.

Of course I came to realize after traveling to my country that Sudan is also a pool of many, many languages. Go figure!

She also showed us an old newspaper, the yellow kind, telling about when the KSA were, I’m terrible with numbers, 14 provinces then a merger was ordered and it became 13, something like that. (correct me if I’m wrong)

And I was like where did she find that?

Because I was a girl who can draw and was a big fan of anime and PlayStation games I had a love story with Japan, I loved anything Japanese and documentaries about Tokyo in particular were like the best thing ever, Tokyo to me was the city of the future, the place of dreams, where everything can happen. When she taught the class about Japan ablah Mufidah brought for everyone of us a package delivery of a Japanese sweet that to my disappointment I don’t remember it’s name! it wasn’t a bizarre kind of food, it was actually more of a Middle Eastern sweet but less sugary.

Then when it was USA’s turn, she brought us burger and chips and coke, yup the classic.

I still remember some of her classes which proves how good she was, and she is the kind of person I would take with me on a trip around the world, cause she is knowledgeable, funny, and awesome like that :)

To a respectable and influential teacher

Mufidah

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