Nepal
Poor Maya contacted Maddy from Kathmandu (no joke!) asking her to clean up his map of Nepal which shows his sampling areas. She thought it was beyond her so she asked me to work on it. Ugh! A fuzzy, poorly reporduced line map embedded in a word document! I started by enlarging it in Word then taking a screenshot and pasting it into Photoshop. In retrospect, I should probably have printed it out and scanned it but I didn’t think of it at the time. I played around with the contrast to darken the lines as much as possible. I actually drew in a river and its tributaries, completely guessing! Then I cleaned up all the schmutz in the background, made new, larger symbols for the lakes, mountains, cities and sampling sites and we sent it off to Maya.
Unfortunately, I was working with an older map that wasn’t up to date. After Maddy sent it to Maya, he wrote back to say it was missing some of the data. So, today I finally found time to revisit it. In the end I had to add text layers for all of the sampling site labels so, while I was at it, I also rewrote the country and city names that I could make out. I wish I could have found another map for him. I even looked on line and would have been willing to shell out a little $$. However, the only usable thing I found was $500. That exceeds my generosity! So, hopefully, this will be enough for Maya to include in his journal submission. I think it’s amazing that I worked on an image for someone in Nepal! Ah…our shrinking global village. 
