This was the first Shangalia trip of the year and I was
happy to see all the familiar faces and joyful kids who were eager to learn and
play games. This year the director of Shangalia
introduced football and all the kids including the boys from our school were excited
to hear this. But first we had to teach them new things either math, reading, storytelling,
art or music. I decided to do storytelling this time with Rhea because last time
reading didn’t work out as well as I hoped so I wanted to try out storytelling.
First we got into a circle and sat on the stage and we asked the kids to go one
by one into the circle and tell us a story. But this didn’t work out as
well as we hoped because some kids started speaking in Kiswahili or they spoke
really soft and it was hard to understand them. So then we decided to play
games instead because that’s what they wanted to do.
So we got off the stage and we played the game “what’s
the time Mr. wolf’ and it didn’t work out so well because the kids didn’t really
understand what to do and they were too shy to say ‘what’s the time mr. wolf’
so we played a game where rhea would stand at the wall and if her had was faced
the other way they tried to run up to her without her looking. This game was a
success and they really enjoyed it. After a while of playing the same game we decide
to play hide and seek and they were
pretty good at this game considering the
fact they live here and they know that best places to hide which made it hard
for us to find them. Before we knew it time went by really fast and it was about
3:30 which meant it was time to play
football and the majority of the kids went to play while the others sat down
and watched. This was a really good introduction to the first trip to Shangalia
of this new year of 2012 because it was really fun and I could see the joy in the kids eyes
when they were playing the games or even learning. But I could tell that
playing football was the best part of the whole day. It was really funny to see the boys from ISK playing football with the kids because they were all so tall while the ball and the goals were really small and at some point one of the boys from our school sat in the goal and their whole body could block out any shots going into the goals. It was really funny to see.