September 6, 2007- It's All Fun and Games

September 6, 2007- It's All Fun and Games

Sonjelle went to the kitchen to pick up our breakfast and handed me my plate.  The same fried eggs and sweet white bread as yesterday.  A little saltier, but still tasty.  At any rate, it's got to be better than the sour-smelling porridge the kids eat.  
 

After breakfast we took the kids across the “street” to play games at the sports stadium.  We brought our soccer ball and played girls against boys (the boys beat us in a shoot-out), and then I taught them how to play the epic game that determined the social hierarchy at my elementary school: FourSquare.  Teaching FourSquare was on my shortlist of things to do.  I love this game.  I fantasize about teaching the game to children world-wide, and being the catalyst for the game catching on to the point of becoming an Olympic sport. 

All you need is some chalk (or a stick on dirt) and a ball that bounces.  One person stands in each of the four squares on the grid that’s drawn on the ground, and the person in the fourth, or “King” square serves by bouncing the ball and swatting it into another square.  First serve is to square one, second to square two, third to square three, back to one, and so on.  Once the ball is served, players swat the ball after one bounce, using one hand, into other player’s squares.  If the ball bounces twice, the person in that square is out.  If the ball bounces on a line or out of bounds, the last swatter is out.  The person “out” leaves their square and gets back in line, anyone in a lower square moves up one slot and the first person in line steps into square one.  It’s addicting.  The kids were totally in to it.
  
When we were all tired out, we played tick-tac-toe, checkers, and Memory on the clubhouse porch.  I’m fascinated by the different rules people use to play the same games I grew up playing.  The kids had these little wooden tick-tac-toe boards.  You play like normal until all the pieces are used, and if no one has won yet, you can move one piece per turn one peg (not diagonal) until someone wins.  Checkers had different rules, too -- all pieces move any direction, and distinguishing “kings” is impossible.  Memory rules don’t require cards to be in rows.  They are scrambled so there’s no order, and sometimes the kids will move pieces around in the middle of the game.  It’s terrible!  Chaos!
  
After lunch (“red-red,” which is beans and fried plantains, both covered in palm nut oil, and scoured with tongue-numbing scotch bonnet peppers—I LOVE it.  It’s incredibly tasty.) I shared my dried apricots, which the children thought were weird.  I was hoping it would butter them up for my “art exchange” project.  Turns out, they didn’t need buttering up, and even if they did, dried apricots were not the way to do it.


Before coming to Ghana, I coordinated a workshop at the Boston Children’s Museum where kids made drawings of their favorite food, pets, family, friends, and ball teams for me to bring to Ghana.  Each drawing had a photo of the artist to accompany it.  The HardtHaven kids gathered around me on the porch, pouring over every photograph and every drawing.  A blonde middle school girl and her drawing of her yellow lab was a favorite.  The boys connected with a similarly aged sports nut.  When I got to a photo of an African American girl with a drawing of her house and family, they all stared at me incredulously. 

“She is not from America.  She is not yavo.”

“Oh, she is” I assured them, skipping ahead to share more photos of children of all skin tones.  “All different colors of people live in the United States.” 

Mouths dropped.  Eyebrows went up.  Young minds were blown.

I let them each choose a drawing and photo to keep and they skipped off to stash them away.  Before dinner they reconvened, asking if they could make drawings for me to send back to their new American friends. 

After dinner (a huge plate of oily cup-of-soup type noodles with hot sauce for us, and unidentifiable fishy-smelling stew with sour-smelling dough for the children) they asked if they could start making drawings right away, even though it was dark out and there’s one little light for us all to see by – I was beaming!  We drew until bedtime, and just after the last crayon was put away and the last bedtime story was read, Matilda stumbled though the front gate.

The minute the gate clanged shut the compound temperature dropped ten degrees.  If this were a western, the piano player would stop playing, the card-dealer would slide their hand under the table to finger their pistol, and tumbleweed would blow past.  She staggered just a bit, a fourth of a cup of clear liquid sloshed in the bottle in her hand, and her scowl was so fierce that I didn’t even notice her exposed left breast until she was standing directly in front of us.  Leaning against the rail, she used her free hand to flip her shirt down, then, apparently thinking better of it, flipped it back up.

Without saying a word, she turned, continued to flip her shirt up and down, and made her way to the toddler boy’s room, where the matrons sleep, and passed out.