Games Galore

I wasn’t going to come into town this week because Korite is either tomorrow or Thursday and I’m headed into Kolda the day after that. It is unclear which day it will be because the night before yesterday was “Layyla” (Arabic for “night”), when the moon “dies”. Now we wait until the new moon comes and the day after it is first sighted is Korite. It should show up tonight or tomorrow. My plans were changed, however, because I was sent into Velingara with a hefty shopping list. We need a lot of vegetables for the Korite feast, and I am more than willing to buy veggies for my family, so here I am. Another note on vegetables: my okra started coming in this week and we got to eat some of it the other day for dinner. It was very exciting to get to see the produce from my garden make it into our meals. I have ideas of expanding the garden and I hope to buy some mint today to plant as well. Suggestions and tips, especially on composting and other organic garden-care are more than welcome.

A while ago I was asked about games they play here (it was Leslie or Kayla that asked). I wanted to video some of them to make it easier to explain, but as we see, I have had no luck in uploading photos, so I’m not gonna even try videos. Instead I’ll just do my best to explain them and I hope this makes some sense. As a gift for my family, I brought back Ludo, the Senegalese board game, when I came back from Thies training. It is a lot like Parcheesi or Aggravation I’ve been told (I’ve never played Aggrevation), so we’ve been playing that a lot. Everyone enjoys Ludo.

The men play a card game that I forget the name of. You try to get cards by putting down the last one of a number. So if person A plays a 7 (it’s only 7 through Aces), person B plays a 7 and then takes them both. If person C has a 7, he plays it too and takes all 3 from B. Maybe D doesn’t have any 7s so he plays another card and they try to take all those as well. You can only take the number that is on the top of the middle pile, or on top of the other player’s piles. So if C has 3 sevens, but then takes 2 queens, the sevens are then “safe” until the queens are taken away. I know it doesn’t make a bunch of sense explained on a blog, but I’ll learn it really well and then bring it back to the US.

The kids like to play different games. The boys like marbles: you have a starting line and a small hole in the ground about 15 feet away. The players take it in turns to try and roll their marble from the starting line into the hole. If you get in, you get to try to knock into the other marbles (kind of like croquet, only tossing them). If you hit them, you get to keep them. When one player’s taken all the marbles, they start a new round. Each player starts with 2 marbles and plays each round with only one. If a player loses both marbles, he’s out. When one player gets all the marbles from all the other players, he wins.

The girls like hopscotch. There are twelve “houses” (squares) arranged in two rows. You start at one side and toss your playing piece into the first one and then have to hop around the houses, skipping the one with your playing piece. You do this for every square, just like in Hopscotch, and you can only let one foot touch the ground at a time, even when you lean down to pick up your piece. When you’ve successfully made it around all 12 squares, you have to cover your face with a cloth and walk “blindly” through the squares. If at anytime during the game you step on a line or out of the squares, you lose your turn and have to start where you left off on your next turn. If you complete the blind walk with no mistakes, you have the right to claim a “house”. You stand at the front of the line of houses and throw your playing piece over your shoulder. If it lands in an unclaimed house, you now own it. You can stand in your house with both feet on the ground and other players cannot step there unless you give them permission. You might give them permission if you own 3 or more houses in a row because otherwise they’d have to jump all three in one go, but sometimes you make them do it just so you can laugh. The game goes on until all the houses are claimed.

Believe it or not, the younger kids like to play hoop and stick… think about any pictures you’ve seen of colonial America. Same game.

They also play soccer here, and there is a kind of wrestling that sometimes comes on TV. It reminds me of bears fighting because two men will circle each other and paw at each other until one rushes the other and then each tries to throw the other to the ground. The first one on the ground loses the match. As you can imagine, matches go fairly quickly once they actually wrestle, but the build-up is immense and can take a very long time.

Other popular sports are martial arts of any kind, especially Karate and Tae Kwon Do, and basketball is growing in popularity. There is an organization called SEEDS that helps build basketball programs and hosts basketball and leadership camps with NBA players and coaches helping run them. I am looking into getting them involved here in Velingara.