To start off, I was very bad at this game. I think I got too cocky in the beginning before all the bad things start happening, but the first time, Fatou and Kodjo died pretty quickly. I eventually got the hang of meeting the sustenance and water requirements, knowing which crops to focus on, and then, further on, helping the village in addition to helping the family.

And the fact that “many of Africa’s challenges (such as HIV/AIDS) are not present in the simulation. Instead, the MV Sim purposefully incorporates only a select set of issues to make it a manageable educational tool that models challenges cutting across the disciplines of agronomy, public health, environmental science, and economics” (starting page of game) makes me realize how impossible it is to even fathom how different my wold is to Africa’s world. The MV Sim really does make me appreciate the complexity of meeting the MDG’s that are mentioned on the starting page of the game and how they are implemented in the game because it was really hard to meet them. Kind of a tangent but, I am reading a book called “Cold Tangerines” and the author visited Africa. She went on about how you have to be in the right mental state to visit the continent and how things you see there will be forever etched into your brain. I kinda shrugged it off as her being dramatic, but after this simulation, I am getting a bigger picture of just how intense, and kind of scary, Africa is.

One thing that really stood out to me was that both Fatou and Kodjo were 16. I know this may be typical of Africa to get married young, but as an outsider, and someone who is older than that and still had zero clue to how do the game/keep them alive, their age shocked me. And not because I necessarily care about how young people get married at, but because how can they survive and do business and work 12 hour days at 16? I don’t know, I just found their young age to be something that really caught my attention.