An Unorthodox Egg Hunt

Just wanted to share a rather amusing, but albeit faintly ridiculous game which I co-devised today… and in doing so illustrate the usefulness of overtiredness and a willingness to risk and improvise.

I had been in line to potentially take over from someone who had dropped out of the Most Mira Youth Arts Festival in Bosnia this year, but on Friday I received an email sadly informing everyone that due to funding problems the festival was being postponed.  This is always sad to hear, especially when it is something that is almost unique.  Most Mira have been running the festival for 3 years, the focus of which is to bring children and teachers from schools in communities divided by the war in the nineties and engages them in arts activities for 10 days. A large part of the work is also to train and mentor local Bosnian artists so that they might continue the work themselves after the festival has finished.  However, without going into the whys and wherefores of the importance of this work or the lack of funding, Most Mira had already planned a training day with Artswork on group dynamics and one-to-one coaching in order to help us support our local artist mentees during the festival and so they decided to go ahead with it anyway.  Which is how I found myself in a workshop at 10am on my only proper day off of a couple of weeks.

The workshop began with a brief chat about what we would be doing followed by the Most Mira staff and the facilitator promptly standing up, gathering their things and walking out of the room.  Puzzled, we all looked at each other and then noticed the instructions written on the flip chart,

‘YOU CAN OPEN ONLY ONE’

Eh?

Then we noticed two envelopes on the floor underneath. ‘Read what they say.’ someone suggested.  One said,

‘PLAY IT SAFE’

the other,

‘TAKE A RISK’

'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice.

Pretty quickly and painlessly, we decided ‘Take a risk’ was the one we wanted to go for, despite a brief thought that perhaps it was some kind of double bluff and 'Play it safe' might have been more interesting, it was opened and the contents revealed.  We were instructed to split into small groups, choose a parcel from the selection on the table and prepare a creative response to its contents to present to the group.

My group, consisted of myself and two women who were part of the dance team.  We were all feeling the Sunday morning vibe, so when we opened our parcel to find a sheet of stickers with illustrations of different kinds of eggs and the names of the species of bird written under them, the feeling of 'meh' followed by 'Oh fuck' was palpable.  My head swimming with exhaustion, the only creative response I had at that moment was to curl up into a foetal shaped ball and hide, however, as today was apparently the Orthodox Easter Sunday an egg hunt was quickly suggested.  We were pretty clear that we didn't want to 'present' anything and so determined to get the group to do something we could watch and with overtired hysteria prevailing, things got a little silly, especially when we started trying to subtly stick the egg stickers in out-of-the-way places with everyone else still working in the same room.   

Nonetheless, down the rabbit hole we went and eventually this is the game we devised:

Part 1

1.  Find an egg sticker and read the label of the type of bird it came from.

2.  Stick the sticker on your forehead. (Egg on face)

3.  Mime hatching out of the egg you found.

4.  Take on the exact characteristics of the bird you are and continue moving around the room and interacting with each other.

Part 2

1.  There should be one less sticker than there are players. The last person left without an egg sticker, becomes the Easter Bunny.

2.  The Easter Bunny must hop and chase the birds to steal their eggs.

3.  The Easter Bunny must return the eggs to the basket (empty sticker sheet)

4.  The birds must try to protect their eggs as best they can, however once their egg is stolen they must then become a sad version of their bird and continue moving around the room mourning their loss.

5.  The game is over when all the eggs have been returned to the basket.

I have to say watching this game was the most fun I've had on a Sunday morning for a very long time.  The confusion of people asking each other  'But how does a Rufous-naped Wren behave?!', the sight of the poor Animator (and only man in the room) who had to become the Bunny and hop around trying to get stickers off the bird's foreheads and the poor mourning birds was too much to bear at times... 

I personally can't think of a better way to spend my lie-in!

The Laminated Woman

So I've been volunteering with a family learning programme at HMP Holloway in Resettlement every couple of weeks.  Yesterday, I was there assisting the women in making books for their kids, nieces, nephews...

They had started them the previous week (I hadn't been there) and so this time some of the women arrived with things they'd prepared during the week to laminate in this session. As the children of these women are of mixed ages and interests, there was a mixture of educational books; simple alphabet, counting and vocabulary books decorated with pictures of characters from kids TV. One woman had, with her nail scissors, painstakingly cut out and stuck down dozens of tiny shapes for counting. Others had opted for kind of memory books for their kids; they had brought photographs of memorable outings or school pictures, favourite places, treasured holidays and had stuck them on paper and written captions. One YO (who was serving a sentence for her involvement in the August riots) made a gorgeous wee book of things that she likes to do for her son and things she'd like to do in the future, stories, drawings, puzzles and illustrations.  She was extremely careful to make sure that all the spellings were correct (continuously asking me to confirm what she already knew, but hey) and had clearly put a lot of thought into it.

Another woman had prepared material for THREE books during the week in her cell and was keen to have it all laminated. She was quite determined and slightly manic in her insistance on laminating anything that wasn't nailed down. Unfortunately, due to funding constraints the number of laminating pouches was limited and so it was necessary to ask her to edit a bit.  She mainly wanted to protect the pictures of her two kids, so I began to fit them into pouches: (something you might not know about me, but in my former life as an English Language teacher, I was obsessed with lamination, so at this point I was in heaven!) What was really interesting was the feeling of people desperately trying to be on their best behaviour. This woman I sensed would, in a different situation, have kicked off at not being allowed to laminate everything she wanted and yet here she was clearly aware of being seen to be reasonable and cooperative. She even offered to ask her Mum to take some pouches from her work (in the NHS) to reimburse us next time: robbing Peter to pay Paul kind of defeated the object, so it was declined in the genuinely giving spirit it which it was offered! Despite her best efforts, she was easily frustrated by things which presented even the slightest difficulty and so I had to give her a lot of support. She wanted to make a mood calendar but couldn't concentrate long enough to make sure that the grid had even spaces.  She was on the verge of giving up, so I sat with her and showed her how to measure it with a ruler and divide the rows and columns of the grid evenly.  She kept saying how grateful she was to my colleague that we come to the prison and provide this opportunity for the women to do things for their kids.  No doubt she is grateful, as they all are: for women, incarceration hits hard. Many of the women I have met through these afternoon sessions are in the process of having their kids adopted, at best they are being cared for by a grandparent and on rare occasions, their father. One woman who put her head through the door to see what we were doing, said that she has grandchildren who have never seen her and so signed up for a later date. Having a space where they can come and make things for the important kids in their lives and, more significantly, talk about them, is extremely powerful considering that for most of the women, being able to be with their children is the only thing that is driving them forward to get out of prison and on the straight and narrow.

The woman with the three books had made a mistake: she had had me laminate a page which she hadn't meant to so that her child could write the answers in. Although I was secretly happy that we would save on laminating pouches if she wanted to go this way, I pointed out to her that actually this was better as her child could write things in the gaps and then wipe them away. The woman thought about this for a while and a little later, she said, "Oh!  I get you now! Sorry, I didn't understand what you meant, but he can wipe it off if he makes a mistake."  She seemed really pleased with this idea and it only struck me why later that evening: everything underneath remains protected, but you can wipe the slate clean. You make a mistake and you wipe it clean.