Social Story – When the World was an Orange
Photo credit: seriousfun from morguefile.com
I walked down the road to the big blue building in the distance, a skip in my step. There may have been a hop and a jump somewhere in there too. Because I was happy! I was very happy! You know that giddy bubbly feeling you have inside your tummy that doesn’t seem to have any beginning or end, but stretches on from the tips of your fingers to the ends of your toes, and it makes you feel all warm and cuddly in the center of your chest, and makes your lips stretch from ear to ear showing all your lovely pearly whites while your cheeks ache?
You’re doing it right now, aren’t you? Aren’t you? Haha!
It is good to be happy. Well I’m happy because I’m going to my absolutely favorite place in the whole city. The Museum! It has ten white steps leading up to its big blue doors that tower over me. It would be scary, but blue is my favorite color. It is always bright and cheery inside and the museum Director always greets me with a smile because I’m her favorite person. She lets me go around the museum by myself after I learnt the floor plans of the entire two-storey building.
Did you know that my museum has as many rooms as there have been years in history? At least that is how I feel every time I visit this old place and see all the rooms filled with old, musty, dusty things, groaning chests, clanking suits of armor and clacking dinosaur skeletons. No matter how many times I come to the museum it seems like it just never ends. There’s always so much to see and every day is a new adventure when I get to learn something new.
Well, today I’ve come to see the Solar System and the Earth models in the big Universe room. It’s not like the silly little models we have in school, made of squishy thermocole, with little balls for the planets and rainbow colors for their elliptical orbits. This one is very big and the planets all hang from the ceiling of the room on metal wires. All of them are painted like they show on Discovery Channel. Saturn is the prettiest after Earth.
I come to the museum sometimes to do my homework, like today. It is quiet and peaceful and the museum library has so many books that I can use to read for my homework. I really, really like to read. Sometimes, the Director helps me find a good book and I can take it home as long as I return it within a week. And I do.
So I decided to do my Geography homework at the museum today because they have a bigger model of the inside of the Earth. It shows all the layers of the Earth from the Magma to the Crust. My teacher says the Earth looks like an onion, and that if we keep taking off the layers from the top, we will reach the molten magma at the center.
I read in a book somewhere that some boys were trying to dig a hole through the center of the Earth straight down to the other side of the world to China. Maybe they didn’t know about the magma.
And I read in The Secret Garden yesterday how Susan Sowerby says that the world was shaped like an orange and that the whole orange doesn’t belong to anybody.
“When I was at school my jography told as th’ world was shaped like a orange an’ I found out before I was ten that th’ whole orange doesn’t belong to nobody. No one owns more than his bit of a quarter an’ there’s times it seems like there’s not enow quarters to go round. But don’t you–none o’ you–think as you own th’ whole orange or you’ll find out you’re mistaken, an’ you won’t find it out without hard knocks.” `What children learns from children,’ she says, ‘is that there’s no sense in grabbin’ at th’ whole orange–peel an’ all. If you do you’ll likely not get even th’ pips, an’ them’s too bitter to eat.'”
— Susan Sowerby, The Secret Garden.
By Frances Hodgson Burnett. Chapter 19.
I remembered that when I saw the model of the inside of the Earth. I think its better than saying that the world is an onion. No-one can peel off all the layers of the Earth like that; it’s too big. Some people have tried to do it, like when they were digging the gold and diamond mines in Africa. I saw the pictures on the National Geographic Channel. They had dug so many holes into the earth and then it all fell into the hole because it became like the Swiss cheese that Jerry Mouse likes to hide in. There! Homework done! Now to look around some more.
If you wander down to the History displays, you will find a lot of statues and small dolls’ sets. They tell stories about different times when people lived in different places. It starts from the dinosaurs and shows how monkeys turned into the first humans. Everything on the Earth lived together in peace and harmony. Everyone was happy. Everyone smiled and laughed and took care of each other. Everyone was good.
But soon, people began to change. They made tools from rocks and wood and killed animals and lived in caves. Things were still good then because they did all this for their families. Then the men learnt to make sharp knives and swords and spears from metal of different kinds. They made big cities with strong, thick walls made of rocks like that Mayan display there and the Egyptian one opposite it.
Armies fought across the plains and mountains and blocked rivers and cut down forests, all to defeat and conquer others who were weaker than them. Can you see those little chariots in the Egyptian display and the bigger ones in the Roman one? People learnt to make better tools and so even their tools of war became better. Forts and castles had catapults and kings kept many many soldiers. They had foot soldiers and horse cavalry and charioteers. The Roman soldiers wore little leather dresses and had funny horse-crest helmets.
Soon came the turn of the little bang bang sticks that made fire come out of their mouths. Those guns and rifles spread across the world and within a few years, everyone had them. In the beginning, guns were only used to protect people from big animals in the forests. But when people started using them to kill each other, it started another kind of war. And that war became a race to see how many people one person could kill. Kings faded away and in their place came the lawyers and bankers and investors and businessmen, all intent on getting a piece of the pie. Or orange.
Humans have changed in all these years. Everybody wants to get more power and hurt people. My teacher told us that people who were in the bad fights died because somebody somewhere wanted something elsewhere. I’m not sure what that means, but my teacher is very smart. She gets 27 apples every day and we all share them with her in recess.
Look there. I call this the Hall of Disasters. This one is nice, Vesuvius erupting and covering everything in ash. I read about it in the National Geographic magazine. Such a sad story. That is the destruction caused by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s right opposite the accident at Chernobyl. And here’s the reactor accident at Fukushima.
My teacher says the world is going bad. Countries are fighting each other for food and oil and other things. Now nobody is happy. People are sad and tired and keep fighting all the time. No-one has the time even for a simple walk around the garden. Because mostly, there are no more gardens. In this race to win the biggest war, humans forgot that there is only one Earth. We can’t live anywhere else. But they still insist on destroying this world.
Sooner or later, the Earth will disappear. There will be no more forests for camping, no more lakes for boating and swimming, no more snowy mountains to go skiing, no more rivers for fishing. They will keep digging the earth for gold and diamonds and coal and minerals, and the water in the ground will finish. There is already so much global warming, but if it gets worse, even the air will be bad for us. No more blue sky and twinkly stars and constellations with funny names.
Oh! The Director is calling me! It must be getting late now and I must go back home. Maybe I will tell you another story the next time I come here. But I will show you one more thing before I go. You see that painting in the corner? That is what I think the world used to be like before humans all became greedy. When the world was still clean and beautiful and whole, like an orange. They don’t understand that the only way to enjoy an orange is to divide and share equally all of its 10 segments. That way it’s neater and sweeter and mum says the juicer eats up half the orange anyway. What a waste!
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