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Published: September 2nd 2006
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The Green Beings
Fun on day one in the forest. it’s been six weeks give or take a week or so since our last blog entry and plenty has happened upon and around us. but for the most part this should be about the children.
to begin with we posted some information about our project plans in the town and along with it a kind of registration day date, and sat back and waited. we expected maybe forty or so kids to attend. we decided to give them a form they could give to their parents and return if they were interested.
two days before the big day we already had one hundred and thirty two applicants. word travels fast among the children of nanling. so we divided the children into four groups: red, green, blue and yellow and began to run around sorting art supplies, cleaning and decorating the space and all kinds of other organizational stuff too . on the first day we contended — and i say contended because it was more like a scrap than a lesson— with the greens. well actually it was more like an argument you were having with forty or so people, one in which the objective was to hold the
Twig Action
Monkeying around on the first day of TWIG with the kids in Nanling. attention of said people for two hours.
all the other groups that week seemed on the face of things to be a breeze compared to the virtual typhoon we weathered with the green group that monday morning. and so they were awarded the title of most difficult group but as we re-evaluated the situation and made the groups smaller by half ie. green a, green b, etc. we found the greens to be one of the more fun / energetic groups. the original idea of a smaller group proved to be a more intimate and ultimately more manageable size to work with.
the first week was a frantic fantastic frenzy of fun and feeling the burn of our self imposed work load and we were both energized and full of the buzz of a new challenge.
as the first week passed by with such intensity, the time just went, almost as if i was unconscious for it. i suddenly found myself interested in these new people i had met and the problems that being involved with them for six weeks would pose. communication and identification seemed to be the most pressing, but trying to learn over one
Up in Arms
classroom as normal... hundred names, let alone one hundred chinese names, seemed unmanageable. so even today as i write this entry i still know very few of the children’s names but have got to know them and recognize them more for the content of their character or their faces and bodies. getting to know anybody is a work in progress. what i’ve learned: if you’ve made up your mind, you are in your head, preventing that person from growing. in turn, if you have contact or relationship with that person your judgment will effect them personally.
together we integrate organization and chaos. it had become apparent in the third week that this project, or this leg of our project, was complimenting the whole very well. as it is an improvisation, no matter what we sit down and plan, the time spent with the children is loose and changeable because it has to be. the lesson plan for the day may change several times through the duration and the results can be anything from exciting and rewarding to disastrous and rewarding. the ups and downs are too many to mention. we have great photos of twig but they never actually capture the moments
The Don't Litter! dance
Being little baby birds who have gotten a tummy ache from munching litter. themselves and my memory and writing skills aren’t up to much either. but this is life.
i think it was somewhere in week four that we both realized we’d never have enough time to try half of the ideas and activities in our note books and that we had to make difficult decisions about exactly what it was we wanted to communicate in these seemingly short weeks we had left. this is what we came up with:
human ecology: what is it, what can it mean
respect: the idea that to respect all things is self respect
perception and awareness: what are they, what could they be
integration: or non separation of the senses
fun: the idea that implementing these ideas and questions can be a fun and exciting way to live and learn
the final sharing/performance went down a storm and we packed the theater, the kids were all fantastic and for nearly two hours the local community got a jazzed up staged version of the children’s time with twig. the theater was decorated with the artwork produced by the kids and we had running slide show and video footage during
intervals.
it’s some thing i’ll never forget and leaving the mountains today was also momentous.
children saw us off with homemade gifts and we shared some tearful minutes with them before being driven to the city by huang xing hai. we passed through the familiar main street of the town i glanced back and left and then right again and again, trying to catch sight of children i know for a last goodbye. we spotted a few before the town limits approached. and so from there on to the highway all the time the memory flashing and the emotions pulsing.
-rdt
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maggie
non-member comment
hey, hey, whaddya say...
Camp Imagination is hard enough, and all the kids speak english. I don't know how you two did it. You're amazing and wonderful.