August 27th - Arts, Crafts, Games & More Games

The last few days, when we've been at either Precious or Olives, it's been all about the games or crafts.

At Precious I learned the 'hokey pokey' (which in England for some reason is the 'hokey cokey' ...) as well as some of the local Kenyan games and songs which were really neat to see. However, we weren't always fully prepared and so we'd reach these points of 'so now what do we do'. At one such point, we introduced 'Simon' or rather 'Susan' says ... we didn't try the concept of being 'out' as it was tricky enough for them to understand not to do what 'Susan' didn't say to do ... but they were getting the hang of it by the end. It came in handy again at Olives when due to an extended equatorial thunderstorm, we were hiding out in one of the classrooms and trying to think of small space games ... after animal sounds and actions lost novelty, rounds of 'Susan says' or 'Kieran says' worked, including the discovery of the power of 'Susan says ssshhhhh', then 'Keiran says sshhhh', you get the idea ... then, the game of last resort, a circular clapping game where we repeat the same rhyme (about a frog jumping banks) until one by one, the circle gets smaller ... and ultimately, we can hear the rhyme in our sleep ... the good news is the rainstorms don't last long and soon enough we were back outside with the space to run around.

We had a few days with the kids which had been quite 'unplanned' shall we say, so we were encouraged to bring a little more 'structure' to bear. So, we decided to do a craft project – a favorite of the kids. This time it was masks and we spent the evening cutting small eye masks out of construction paper. When we arrived at Olives, there were only about 20 kids but word quickly spread and soon there must have been about 50 kids. It was absolute chaos – especially as the masks were a little more manually intensive than we thought in order to get them sturdy enough to wear ... 3 hours and much sparkles, confetti, glue and tape later and we had smiling kids everywhere in these wonderfully colorful, creatively decorated and drawn masterpieces.

The kids love cameras and they absolutely love to have their pictures taken and to then see the picture in the playback mode. There were also a few kids, and one in particular, Pascal, who love to take pictures. Today was the first day I got my camera out – and I gave it to Pascal ... when I took a look later that evening, I had 150 new pictures – and some incredible shots – especially closeups of their faces. One thing I noticed however, is when they have their picture taken, the kids will often pose without smiling - and then sometimes you see the sadness or lack of light in their eyes - brings reality back into perspective.

I'm also starting to make personal connections with some of the kids. There was one girl today, maybe about 8. She was very shy, I'd smile and try and engage her in conversation but she knew very little English (she wasn't part of the school) – soon I noticed that she'd always kind of be near me. About 3 hours later, we were playing catch with a ball made up of plastic bags and she was having a great time. And she could really throw! As we were leaving, she walked with me holding my hand until she headed off in her direction. She took a little bit of my heart with her.