You'll be "Havana" Good Time

These are just a few of the puns in the weekly emails for Geography Club. Each meeting, we focus on one region or country and study the impact of physical and political geography on the history, economy, and people. Our goal is to learn about the effect of surroundings on a society, as well as to learn how different communities all over the globe develop. This helps me contextualize current events, history, and the ways different people interact nowadays. It’s also extremely interesting to learn how, despite Bhutan and Nepal’s almost identical physical geography, they are wildly different countries today predominantly because of the southern portion of Nepal—just 17 percent of its land mass.

Each week, we research different topics and meet to present and discuss. Back in Third Form, when I started the club with my friend, we chose the next country off a hand-made cardboard wheel. We now let whoever wins the trivia at the end of the meeting pick countries. We want to ensure we don’t just favor well-known or seemingly "more impactful" countries, because the more you learn about any one place the more fascinating it becomes.