Congratulations to all the kids who have completd another year of school! Because school is out and Summer vacation has begun, I wanted to write a special post about the kids here in Thilogne! In Pulaar, the word for kids is Sukaabe (soo-KA- bay).  Kids have a lot more freedom than kids in America for a few reasons, and they also have more domestic responsibilities.  For example, the 6 year old girl in my compound does a lot of the cooking for her mother and younger brothers.

Kids walk to school by themselves, buy groceries for their parents, and they often roam around unsupervised. One reason for this is that we live in a village (albeit a large one) in which everyone knows each other, and to a certain extent there is the practice of communal parenting. The adults will watch out for all the kids and they will also discipline a kid who is not their own, if they see fit. Furthermore, there are not many cars that go through the village, so the only things one really needs to watch out for are the charettes, which are usually going slowly enough for people to move out of the way.

The thing I lik most about the kids here is how happy they are playing with the simplest things.  They don’t have Playstation or Wii or even board games or dolls or sports equipment.  It’s really cute to see what they come up with.  Here are a few things I have seen on a regular basis around the village:

kids attach a pole to a can push it around,

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they dig a small hole in the ground and try to throw rocks into it,erins-photos-006

they play a game similar to field hockey, except they use their flip-flops to hit a tennis ball and score a goal;

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and a game of marbles is by far the village favorite.

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If you are interested in donating school supplies to these kids, check out “School Supplies for Sukaabe” on the right.  Hope you all have a great summer!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 20th, 2009 at 10:06 am and is filed under Pre-service training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.