Bringin’ the Fun to Mozambique

Parents back home will travel miles and spend hours attending the next sporting event that their children are participating in. Hovering parents sometimes get in the way of allowing the apron strings to be untied once their children go off to college. One of the cultural barriers that I personally had a hard time with was watching how children in the villages are put in a situation where they have to grow up and take on more responsibilities at the early ages of three or four.

As most of my students at Cumberland High School know, I have quite the collection of shoes. Yes, I’m a shoe-a-hol-ic. My evening routine consists of planning out my wardrobe attire for the next day. It did not take me long to realize that the tattered stained t-shirts of the children were worn day after day. Most of them had no shoes and some of them walked around with only one, and they cherished this one shoe. I don’t think I will be visiting DSW anytime soon.

As we worked our muscles to their max hauling buckets of rocks, mortar and sand, shoveling, spackling and carrying block, (Jillian Michaels has nothing on this daily workout) their tiny faces would peek around the trees, watching from afar with curiosity. They have no TV, no internet, no VIDEO GAMES!!! I did notice a few cell phones here and there.

Although we were supposed to be working, Cristen and I decided that we needed to bring some play time to the site and we began to scheme and plan. On day one we tried to show them to play “Patty Cake” until we got two-thirds of the way through it and realized that we couldn’t remember all the words. The kids didn’t care as they couldn’t understand what we were saying anyway, but laughed along with us. Day two we branched out to “Duck Duck Goose!” which was a huge success even though it turned into “Duck Duck DUCKY!!!” Day three we went all out and created relay races with spoons and rocks instead of eggs, three legged races tied with our bandanas and the plunger race using our spatula utensils from our cabin. Other activities included drawing and coloring thanks to Penny and Maggie (aka “The Peggys), dancing by putting their feet on our feet to the tunes of the major 1990’s music coming from the next door neighbor (It was a mystery of where the actual music was coming from or how it was being played.), and continuous high fives mainly because they wanted to smell the Purell hand sanitizer on their hands.

There was no other joy than listening to the laughter and seeing the smiles that stretched from cheek to cheek. There was no other warmth than having a child who does not speak my language crawl right into my lap wanting to be embraced. There was no other elation than to be standing around waiting for the next bucket of mortar run than to have a tiny warm hand reach up for mine and just stand in peace. The overall joy of this whole experience was sharing the connection with my own child. An experience that words cannot express as it has to be felt.

Ann Kysely