Documentary Work/Play

Is play actually work? Does it work to play and improve lives? Can play be international language for positive change?

Africa looms much closer on the horizon today.  I will likely be there much sooner than I realized... Like a few days?!

Documenting the struggle and resilience of Dakar youth

A tiny village without electricity high in the Cordillera Blanca of Peru's Andes ©Bennett Barthelemy/Tandem

My first foray in to the creative fundraising world... I am about to launch a Kickstarter program...

Perhaps my biggest challenge to date was sitting in front of the video camera yesterday. I realized I like to be holding the camera - not being the subject. I guess this was my crash course in empathic understanding for all the folks who have been patient models for me over the years was overdue.

This documentary project is powerful for me on many levels.

I worked with kids from third grade to high school for over a decade on and off. Doing both experiential and outdoor education. I saw incredibly positive results. Kids who were shy or nervous gaining confidence - normal school dynamics fall apart on a hiking trail, while climbing and doing team building activities. Kids gain agency and become active participants in their own lives and in forging the collective goodwill of the group. With a little mentoring and helping to empower kids to realize they have a voice, worthwhile questions and knowledge to share, and wonder is appreciated - creates a space fo certain positivity to blossom - and helps with a strong sense that our challenged world just might be OK.

I have missed that time in my life. There were daily rewards with smiles, wonder, inspiration, laughter. Playing a game to teach about the local geology, or each taking turns speaking our collective myth about a group of stars we were viewing under the night sky, walking with your blindfolded partner and being their eyes...

But this was in the deserts of the American Southwest and the mountains of California's Sierra Nevada. With large budgets for travel, props and shiny new protective gear, fancy vehicles to travel in and nice and safe national parks and state parks. The population was largely wealthy private school groups, upper middle class kids and from the first world... And with very little in the way of language and cultural differences. We never had to question if we would be eating the next day. We counted on the fact that we would be safe so we could better focus on having fun and learning through play.

Africa and the international non profit Play For Peace intrigue me. PFP is taking aspects of what I was doing with experiential education and will bring it Senegal in a few days. PFP has never been to Senegal before and it poses for them a largely unknown landscape of new cultures and languages. Granted, they are in 23 different countries and expanding - There programs and techniques are in communities of conflict around the globe so they have a leg up. They are following the model of cooperative play and using whatever is easily available in these communities for props and gear that have little or no budget for such things as play. The plan is to stay for two weeks- play, train, mentor and then leave...

Will I uncover more powerful play parallels in Senegal to my time in the US? What will the parallel be to kids having fun while holding a climbing rope and building trust while on $100,000 climbing wall and ropes course? The facilities will be vastly different in this city of two million and in a country where 50% live below poverty. Does play empower youth in the long term? Obviously PFP thinks so. They help build centers with local communities to effect this change on a sustainable level to help improve the lives of these youth that often live in intense poverty, surrounded by violence, vast unemployment, natural disaster and war-prone areas.

The languages spoken in Senegal are enough to exhaust the most dedicated polyglot. French, Wolof, Arabic, English and many other tribal languages... Religious and cultural diffrences, infrastructure, poverty, literacy.... And then simple play - empowering youth through coopertaive play and mentoring... Can this make the world a better place? Sounds great. I plan to find out...