What Ice?

What Ice?

The first official day of the program started with a lot of different orientations for the students.  We had speakers from all the organizations involved.  We had orientations about the students’ classes over the next months, orientations about their computers, their applications lab, their cafeteria rights, and their dorms.  We then had assessments on every subject they will be covering.

Finally, in the evening we were able to listen to them instead of pumping information into them.  We had worked very hard to prepare what we thought would be about an hour and a half of ice breaking and community building exercises.  That is one of the pillars of the program: community.  We placed deep thought on how we would help them achieve that, how we can make them learn their names, think of each other as part of a common goal and be comfortable with engaging each other in teams and achieving common goals while at the same time learning how to deal with conflict.  We played the battle of the worms where students create a human worm and each team tries to capture the end of the other teams worm.  We then played the dancing name game where students say their name and perform their favorite dance move and the rest join them.

Although we had another game planned once we introduced dance into the mixture it was over.  Three small teams that had been doing the games together spontaneously combusted into an unending series of dancing and clapping games, rapping their names to music made by their hands and feet.  We had officially lost control of the games and we LOVED it!  Every team played on picking off of each other moving from rapping, to singing, to a human tug-of-war game, and even sang to a tune I knew as a child in Spanish.  I had actually thought about introducing the game but figured the song would not translate.  Wrong! Made me wonder if EVERYTHING—music, humans, wildlife, games—comes from Africa.  I can guarantee you that rhythm did! 

The night finalized with a human jumping pile of dance as we asked them to wrap it up.  It seemed like a fitting way and we could nothing but join into the dance.  As we did we saw a plum of vapor go up from the group, the heat of the mass combined with the humidity of the evening.  We went home with the very distinctive feeling that in Africa, among the new generation, there is no ice to break. 

Jose Alfaro