Huye Talking To? Week 6

Week 6 - Children's Group

Matthew Blood, Collette Adams, Tahir Shah, Mico Ayoubu, Mellisa Umutesi, Marie Merci make up the Children's Group.

Creativity and imagination. Can this be learned? The going has been tough, fraught with frustrations (we asked them to draw imaginary animals and about 15 of them drew hens?) and some mind-numbingly dull stories (two people went to market, bought some clothes and some food and went home), but we’re getting there!

We’ve moved from stories detailing the amount of money a couple took to market, and an exact list and receipt of what they bought with it to people finding cobras and enlisting the help of taxi drivers to dispose of the pesky serpents.

It’s great to see their imaginations blossoming. We’ve moved from basic tasks like making little people out of play dough and describing how we’d like them to act if they were our friends, to creating entire countries of dozens of provinces and listing the rights the children believe they should have in these countries.

Real change happens slowly…

What the kids initially struggled with in the imagination and creativity department, they made up for in the resilience department. They throw themselves into any task, often quite forcefully and inducing many a bump, scrape and clatter on the way. Hundreds of them turn up for sports days to show their skills at football, volleyball, rugby and many more activities (the skipping skills are actually ridiculous). As you’d expect, high-intensity sports result in quite a lot of trips and collisions but the robust nature of these tiny people is completely baffling. We witnessed an 8 year old stand up and brush off a tackle that would leave any professional screaming on the ground for minutes. Their resilience and will to get stuff done is infectious.

It’s noticeable that the volunteers are learning from the kids resilience and resourcefulness of just getting on and dealing with everything that’s thrown at them … it’s great to see the team just come up with new ways to tackle any problems they encounter. One example is that a major part of our goal here is to do inclusive sport with the kids, but the field is about 2km away, the day was boiling and there wasn’t any water for the kids – getting them to sprint around for 2 hours in those conditions was out of the question, so up came the genius idea of indoor water bottle bowling. The kids loved it, they stayed cool and they learned a new game they could take home and play.

Another skill we’ve been striving to help the kids develop is sharing. When we first arrived we’d split the children into groups, hand them their resources and be mauled by hundreds of children all reaching for the red crayon. We decided we needed to stamp it out as soon as possible and as resources started to dwindle the team had to come down hard on the kids who tried to snatch the pencils and crayons as soon as they hit the table. More than once the “share or you’re never getting this stuff again” line was used. It clearly worked as the number of fall outs lessened and lessened until finally the sharing culture permeated even to the most stubborn and we achieved blissful harmony as pens, pencils and crayons were treated with respect and shared kindly. 

Stay tuned for week 7...