A Revealing Conversation

We spent our whole day at the Boys and Girls Club today. It was a little awkward at first because there weren't that many kids, but after about twenty minutes we were able to get some games going in the gym. We used half the court for basketball, and in the other half we played freeze tag and then a surprisingly successful game of "Red Light Green Light" (to which I added a challenging "Blue Light" and "Purple Light"!). After a rushed lunch, the games disbanded and both kids and volunteers spread out more through the building. After playing outside on the jungle gym and with the tetherball pole, I spent most of the afternoon with the same three or four girls. We looked for bamboo among the straw, built straw houses and bird's nests, played tic tac toe, colored, played foosball, swung on the swings, and did gymnastics on the parallel bars. Most of the day was spent in unstructured, unsupervised play, in breaking facilities (excluding the playground) and with limited resources.

It was during this time that I had a really shocking conversation with one of the girls. She's only 8 years old, but what she's dealt with so far is far more than ANYone should have to face, much less someone as young as she is. She told me about how she's been the new kid in three different schools so far this year; how her family's been evicted from her old house, and can't return to get the rest of their stuff; about how her cousins live with the rest of her family now because their mom neglected them. She spoke about it all so matter-of-factly, just as if she were explaining a school project or something equally routine. After the conversation, we went right back playing house, or whatever we were doing at that time. That conversation revealed a lot about the community we were working with. Just realizing how tough some of the kids' lives are, how much they have to deal with at home, how much the odds are already stacked against them, reinforced how much they need and deserve a safe, enriching environment to spend their days in. It's frustrating to see how they don't really have that, at least during school vacations.

I know we can't fix anything in the three days that we'll spend there, but hopefully just having someone that happily plays with and patiently listens to them is helpful.