While receiving our new books today, I was unexpectedly ambushed by this passage:
“Dad, you don’t have any playgrounds *at all* in your schools, do you?”
“No,” I admitted. Playgrounds had not exactly been at the top of the priority list for Sarfraz and me.
“You really need to put them in,” she declared. “All children need to play, especially ones that are suffering and hurting like the kids in Pakistan.”
In truth, some of our schools did feature dirt fields where the kids were able to play soccer. But we had no real playgrounds with swings and slides and seesaws. How had we not thought about this earlier?
The next day, Amira phoned two of my friends, Jeff McMillan and Keith Hamburg, at Gold’s Gym in Bozeman and told them that she needed their help in rounding up jump ropes. Word spread quickly, and before we knew it, Amira had more than two thousand jump ropes in our living room. We shipped them off to Suleman in Islamabad, and later that spring - along with an additional seven thousand jump ropes that we purchased in Rawalpindi - they were distributed throughout our tent schools and beyond.
The kids responded in a manner that mirrored their reaction to Farzana’s desks. The play and exercise brought joy and delight to them, and their enthusiasm spread like wildfire into the depressed communities. Before long, we were fielding requests to supplement the jump ropes with cricket bats and socccer balls. And like Farzana’s desks, Amira’s jump ropes provoked a revision of the Central Asia Institute’s operations policy.
Since the spring of 2006, we’ve incorporated playgrounds into most of our new schools, and we have also been working to retrofit a few of our existing schools with swings, seesaws, and slides. Our loyal donors love this idea and have been more than happy to chip in. The playgrounds have also won fans in some unexpected quarters. In the summer of 2009, for example, a group of elders who sympathized with the Taliban paid a visit to one of our schools in Afghanistan with a request to tour the facility. As they walked into the compound and put down their weapons, the leader of this delegation, a man named Haji Mohammad Ibrahim, spotted the playground and broke out into a big smile. For the next half hour, he and his companions gleefully sampled the swings, the slide, and the seesaw. When they finally quit playing, Haji Mohammad Ibrahim announced that they did not need to see inside of the
“But don’t you want to take a look at the classrooms?” asked the principal.
“No, we have seen enough,” replied Haji Mohammad Ibrahim. “We would like to formally request you to come to our village in order to start building schools. But if you do, they absolutely must have playgrounds.”
- Greg Mortenson, Stones into Schools, p 199-200.
It’s like the wind and the sun competing to remove the man’s coat. I swear I had to catch my breath against tears. If only it were all this easy.
- Jessica
