Fun with Rubbish

One of my favorite things in life is when I am able to make a connection with another person. Living in South Africa, where everything is strange to me and I am strange to everyone, has made that a challenge. However, the other day I was able to make such a connection.

I arrived at work at my usual 9:00 AM and hung out with the women cooking for the children and read my book. At 2:00 the children arrived for their after-school meal, which was chicken liver, rice and squash. I am always amazed how their small bodies are able to take unreasonably large mounds of food and turn them into empty plates. While the kids eat I walk around and talk to the different groups of kids. After they finish eating they usually like to play some games that involve chanting or singing in Zulu. This day the playgroup was limited to three boys. I was bored with playing games I don’t understand and seemingly have no point so I exercised some “cross cultural exchange” (PC buzz words) and taught them “Down by the Banks.” After a couple rounds of that they taught me a variation, which was actually in English. The game’s song was about a police officer that needed to shoot someone in the head. When the song ended and your hand was slapped, you got to choose who was shot in the head. Morbid, I know. After that, they taught me a game using three sticks. You place them equal distances apart and, going in a line, step between them. The last person jumps as far as they can from the last stick at which point the last stick is moved to where that person landed. This is repeated from the opposite end until the sticks progressively move wider and wider apart. It was actually really fun. Don’t worry guys, I won. After that we played a game similar to dodge ball. The only problem was that my drop-in-center doesn’t have any sporting equipment. No balls, bats, hula hoops - nothing. These resourceful kids improvised by going to the trash pile (or rubbish as they call it here) and picking up a sheet of plastic which they tied around other garbage, forming a ball. I was so impressed by their resourcefulness and ingenuity. What these children lack in physical resources they more than make up in imagination.

While we were playing something completely genuine came through. Our interactions didn’t focus on the strangeness between our two cultures or the differences in our skin color. It didn’t even matter that our ages were so different. All of that subsided. What was left was four people genuinely having a good time together and connecting.