Johannesburg–East Rand Map

For wounds, we also use Q-tips, antibiotic ointment and medical grade honey. It’s handy to have Dermabond or steri-strips for closing lacerations or long, jagged cuts.

For rare but critical service as a first responder, it’s important to carry Latex or nitral gloves and a CPR mask (though both the American Heart Association and American Red Cross have recognized compression-only CPR as an acceptable alternative).


Helen has valued the benefits of travel for her daughter’s particular learning needs. Here she shares how travel has impacted her family, including her bold strategy for teaching geography skills…

Sooner or later, travel inserts itself into almost every –pardon the pun but it’s a cliche for a reason– homeschool journey.

We’ve needed to punch through an autistic veil in order to reach our oldest; taking her places, near and far, has been key. She’s a hyperlexic visual learner so seeing places and meeting people in real time was a game changer. All the papers, blogs, and videos she had seen suddenly had new meaning; they became filled with tangible places, flesh and blood people, and actual events. She integrated the meaning of the words Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Historical Fiction. Formal lessons ground to a halt and we spent weeks with her bringing us blogs, movies, etc. to label ”real” and ”pretend”. Today, she’s a news junkie that lives for that inevitable fairy-tale-come-to-life story the media spins on a slow night.

I think it’s important to allow time between trips for the children to process where they’ve been, whom they’ve met. Children are still growing and need more rest or they suffer information overload and blurred memories result. Without adequate processing time, they end up with murky impressions of a time in their life, but not learned knowledge which we as adults may have absorbed. It’s the same disorienting concept so many touring bands have described (If this is Tuesday it must be Belgium). Ask yourself one thing: are they going to remember the destination or the hotel? if your answer is hotel, rethink the timeline of the excursion.

Perhaps one of the more educational things we’ve done was something I tried on a particularly boring return road trip. Well, not *more* educational. Maybe *more* entertaining. For me, the parent. We were a little over a day away from home, one state over, in Oklahoma. Up until this point, neither of my girls had taken an interest in map reading, and I didn’t want them growing up dependent on a GPS personality. I drove us 80-90 miles off course and announced we were “lost” and if we didn’t get to the hotel on time, we would be forced to sleep in the car. Ok, so I fibbed a little. But it worked. Together, they plotted a correction course (no time to backtrack) that got us in the jacuzzi before nightfall. No written test involved, mastery demonstrated.

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