Cornerstone: Free-range children

This is a post to describe the activities of children in South Sudan. I am writing it because I love the ingenuity of the children here. It is not part of the culture for parents to be involved in children's play.

Clay modelling is very popular. A few weeks I found several of my school children intently making clay models of various things when I arrived at school. In the national curriculum one of the science units is on uses for soil, so I decided to skip to that unit. The children had a lovely lesson showing off their models and we talked about the uses of clay soil for toys, making bricks and building mud huts.

In Europe, children lead very restricted and sheltered lives by comparison. They play with plastic toys in primary colours, not rather dubious mud from a marshy bit of land. They rarely do anything unsupervised by adults. They spend far too many hours glued to a computer or television screen. They are not expected to play an important role in the family, but are only passive recipients of care.

Here it is very different. Most children belong to large extended families in which older children wash clothes, cook, dig, clean and care for younger children. After these chores are over, they play games with anything they can find.

One of the plus sides to childhood in Nimule is the large number of children who can play together with very few resources. They create very successful toys and games. Plastic bags are used to make footballs or kites. Mud is used to make phones, cars, aeroplanes, model animals and people. Dusty ground is used for drawing. Scrap metal and plastic bottle tops are used to make toy cars. Small stones are used to juggle.

Children have developed great games involving a ball made of plastic bags and a few old bricks. Some games are cross cultural; South Sudanese children play their own versions of hide and seek and blind man’s bluff.

They are surrounded by things that can become toys. Then the toys are discarded and new ones created. Who said these children are poor? They have everything they need to stir their imaginations.

Here is a photo gallery showing a selection of such toys. I hope you will share my admiration for the ingenuity that goes into each toy.