Kids' Games

In our first weeks in Oman I attended church regularly. It was a cross cultural experience, perhaps the cross-culturist experience I have ever had, and involved lots of people dressed in colorful clothing, speaking a Babel tower of languages. We had the Western women dressed in pumps and skirts, chatting in refined English, rubbing elbows with the women wrapped in saris, speaking a multitude of Indian languages and dialects. Next to them were the men wearing khakis and going on in German, jostling into the men wearing long African style shirts over loose, billowing pants, speaking French.

The first Friday church service I went to (Friday being our Sunday here) involved flags and dancing. The second was fairly straightforward. The third was a service of raised arms and hallelujias. All quite different from what I am used to without a doubt, but we went nonetheless (sans Tony after the flags, as he suspected that sacrifices might be on the agenda for the next week).

In the second week there was a call for volunteers to help run an event called Kids' Games. Billed as an event to help rid the world of heathens through sports and fun for kids, I jumped right on board. I wasn't so concerned about the heathen hoardes as I was about getting a day of socialization in for my poor homeschooled children. I was assigned a job as game facilitator, given a whistle, and asked to attend an organizational meeting the following Tuesday.

On Tuesday evening I rolled into the parking lot 15 minutes late as traffic toward Muscat had been especially heavy. No worries, though, as the meeting had not even begun yet. However, twenty others were sitting in neat rows in front of Aaron the Coordinator, who was calling off names of the volunteers who had not bothered to show to be organized at this meeting. As I walked in he checked my name off the list. "Now we will not have to call Rachel's name again." And then he giggled. The other twenty tittered.

This did not bode well.

After ten minutes more we moved into what I believed was to be the meat of the meeting--job assignments. I had arrived thinking that my whistle had made me a game facilitator automatically but not so--at this meeting women were turning in their whistles left and right in exchange for jobs either working registration or first aid. By the time I left an hour and a half later we had a room full of registrars and ad hoc nurses surrounding three game facilitators--me and two other suckers.

Oh no.

Aaron went on to reveal the things about which we should be most concerned as volunteers: that we would be working with over 200 kids, that we should pray especially hard for the 30 of them who were Muslims or Hindu, and that we had to let them all know that, if they lost a game, Jesus would still love them. My American brain really really wanted to hear about a schedule of events, arrangements for parking for the 200 parents who would be dropping off kids, how the three toilets in the church would accomodate the potty needs of so many, and how the kids would be organized.

Instead I got to play a practice round of the game I would be facilitating: Touch the Tail. In spite of the suggestive name, the game involved nothing more that forming two congo lines, tying a silk tail to the person in the back of the line, and then keeping the two lines intact long enough for one team to manage to touch the other team's tail without letting go of one another. My team lost in that practice round. I hoped Jesus was loving me.

Predictably enough, on the day of the event, organization was an issue. Lunch came late, no one knew where to go, kids wandred aimlessly between the game venues, and the martial arts exhibition was a disaster (who would have thought that a bunch of Christians would be so ticked about someone teaching them how to maim someone with a fountain pen?).

Silas contracted a rash from the iron-on decal on the event t-shirt, Tian complained that the kids on her team were rude and disrespectful, and the friend I had invited was roped into volunteering while her kids played the games. I fumed at the amount of standing around I was doing and swore I would never volunteer for this kind of poorly organized foolishness again.

But then the kids got to me. Most of the attendees were either Indian or Fillipino and began to call me "Auntie", as in, "Please, Auntie, will you help me get my hat adjusted?" or "Auntie, where should I go for my next game?" Silas cried and was comforted by a woman who said very gently, "Come, come, let Auntie help you. May I know your good name?" They walked off into the distance with Silas curled lovingly into her side. Tian, who was on the Ghana team, learned that, if pronounced with a British accent, "Ghana" rhymes with "banana", and spent the day cheering for her team, the "Ghana bananas".

And a good time was had by all. Especially the bananas.