Yesterday's Meeting: Emotional Site Experiences and the Traffic Game

Yesterday's meeting was in my opinion, one of the best meetings of the year. Amy James started out by stressing the need for people to be more open and reflective when explaining their experiences at their site. It didn't suffice to simply say "Oh, this week was good, we played with the kids, they were happy, etc.". She encouraged people to delve deeper into their experiences and discuss among other things, their interactions with a particular child at their site, some of the difficulties they faced at their site, or even some of the difficulties the children faced.

Inspired, everybody gave a much more thorough explanation of their experiences at their sites than they had in previous weeks. The story that stands out most in my mind was Henry's about how some children's parents could not even afford to buy them clean underwear or a washing machine. Consequently, these Donovan Middle School students are forced to wear the same underwear almost every day and are made fun of by their fellow classmates. As somebody that was made fun of Middle School, I can only imagine what it must be like for these students to not only be constantly ridiculed, but also be very uncomfortable because they're wearing dirty clothes all the time. Luckily, Kelly Wolfe, the director of the Advantage After School Program, runs a service where she cleans children's underwear at the school. Unfortunately, she is not able to run this service consistently enough, leaving some children for days without clean clothes. One student was so desperate for clean clothes that he broke into Kelly's office, looking for underwear and socks, but unfortunately found none. The school then responded by sending this poor child, who wanted nothing more than clean clothes, home. Henry confessed that one day this student broke down to him and started crying because he couldn't deal with the situation anymore. Luckily, we have some funds in the form of a Bonner Grant that could be used to buy underwear, socks, or even other clothes for children. While buying clothes will be no means by a permanent solution, it will at least provide temporary relief for these tormented, distressed students.

Finally, Amy introduced us to the interactive, yet difficult, Traffic Game. Observing that there was little interaction between the older and younger Bonner Leaders, the idea of this game was to bring us closer together as a group. The rules were simple. There were seven dots placed in a straight line. The middle dot was left unoccupied while three people stood on one side of the dot and the other three people stood on the other side of the dot, facing the first three people. The goal was to get the three people from each side of the unoccupied dot to the other side, but participants were only allowed to go around one person at a time and could not move backwards. Thus, if at any time, there were two people in front of you facing the opposite way, the game was over because you could not get around them, nor could they back up. Three people standing to the side helped decide strategy as they had a more complete view of the dots than any of the direct participants. While the rules were simple enough, coordinating the game was a completely different story. No matter how hard we tried, we simply could not accomplish the goal. We tried many different strategies, including figuring it out on paper, but while some were more succesful than others, they all failed in the end. However, even though we failed to "win" the game, the Bonner were interacting in a way that they had not interacted before and that was a victory in itself. Furthermore, as Amy admitted to us later, she had only seen one team succesfully complete the Traffic Game.