Orangpples

Note: If you haven’t seen my previous blog post, I’m running a half marathon next month to help raise money for a Peace Corps Volunteer started organization Kgwale le Mollo to help send two rural South African kids to one of the best high schools in South Africa. Please consider helping me with a donation! Thanks.

One of the things I’ve been doing since the beginning of the year is taking the kids on my street to the town pool once or twice a week. I’ve known about the pool since my first few months here, but until December of last year never checked it out, however since then I’ve been trying to swim once or twice a week. I actually feel sort of bad about this because there are so many things in the community I could be doing during this time after work; such as volleyball or playing trombone at the Salvation Army, both of which I used to do but now don’t have the time for. There’s not enough time in a day for everything I wish I could do, so one must pick and choose and at least for the remainder of summer the pool will win out.

It’s R10 per time at the pool or R100 for a family membership which lets you bring 6 people in for a month, figuring that even if I couldn’t go to the pool 10 times in a month I could at least take the kids on my street as my “family”. I started out swimming laps on Tuesday and Thursday and taking the kids to the pool on Saturday. Weekdays the pool is almost empty and I can swim a kilometer or so is relative peace. The pool officially closes at 5pm but on weekdays that’s never really upheld and I’ve stayed in as late as 5:45. I don’t really understand how it all works because the manger always leaves at 5pm but the old man in charge of maintenance seems to never leave and I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually sleeps there. It’s not quite like doing laps at UVA’s pool back home but swimming there on weekday afternoons is relaxing and a great way to clear my mind.

Weekends on the other hand are completely different. At anyone time on a Saturday afternoon there are about 150 kids at the pool. Keep in mind the fact that there is no adult supervision, no lifeguard, and many kids don’t actually know how to swim. I’ve seen so many things that make the part of me who grew up going to a Northern Virginia community pool all summer cringe just watching. Like the dog who remembers the now none existence electric fence every time she approaches the edge of her yard; every time I see a kid running on the slippery deck, doing back flips into the shallow end, or standing on someones shoulders right next to the pools edge I some how expect the lifeguard’s whistle and yell of “NO RUNNING”. But it never comes and some how amazingly I’ve yet to see a kid hurt themselves. You can read into that what you want, either how an overly litigious and precaustous American society needlessly hampers kids free play or how kids here are so much better at doing things with out hurting themselves even though there seems to be so little attention payed to personal safety. My guess is that its a combination of both.

Another hallmark of my childhood pool experience draconianly enforced by the very same lifeguards which would be just as impossible to enforce here is the hourly “break” where all kids under 14 had to get out of the pool. On weekends when the pool is swarming with kids the manager and maintenance Baba (as far as I can tell the only two people that actually work at this pool) start telling kids to get out around 4:30 and continue to do so for the next 45 min or so before actually succeeding. A far cry a whistle quarter till the hour signaling all the kids to stop having fun in the pool and get out. As so many kids do, I remember spending most those breaks siting at the edge of the pool eagerly anticipating the next whistle indicating I could jump back in. Now if the first time kids here went to the pool and there were lifeguards to enforce the rules and signal break time, I believe they would be even more well behaved then American kids. In everything from the schools to family life kids are taught to be unquestionably submissive to adult authority and power.

Ngiyakushaya (I’m going to hit you) is one of the most common things a child here’s growing up on my street and in the schools I work in. It’s used so frequently that kids respond to little else other than that. Ask them to pick up the trash they just dropped on the ground, close their door, or any number of other things and they normally wont. Tell them you’ll hit them if they don’t and they will. It’s interesting how the use of physical force makes the authority weaker not stronger. In schools a teachers authority is obeyed not out of respect but fear. Often kids have been scolded and even hit enough times for wrong answers that they are fearful even to try in classroom. Obviously, there are other forms of discipline besides physical force that are more beneficial to all parties involved, but if all a child knew was physical discipline you can’t really expect them magically understand this, it has to be learned.

All that is background for the story that happened last week. As usual I took the kids to the pool on Thursday and when 4:45 came around I told them it was time to get out and get ready to go home. Most of them got out but one of my favorite little boys, Mafera, refused to get out of the kids pool (he’s deathly afraid of the deep pool and even though on our street he’ll jump from an 8 ft wall into my hands he wont jump for the pool edge to me when there’s 4 ft of water around). He just looked at me with this silly grin that partially said your going to have to make me get out and partially showed how much he was enjoying still being in the pool. He kept jumping up as high is he could and falling backwards into the water. Even though I was amazed at his simple joi die vire just to be alive and jump in the the water I’d been in the pool for the last 5 hours and was quite tired and easily irritated. I guess at this point I saw how easy it would be just let my annoyance turn to angle and physically pull him from the pool like he expected me to do. Instead I told him if he didn’t get out now he wouldn’t get to come to the pool on Saturday. I’m pretty sure the full meaning of this didn’t sink in as he continued to goad me into getting him out of the pool. After watching him jump about 10 more times and asking him to get out after each I finally turned around told him that was it he wasn’t coming on Saturday. Again, the full meaning of this didn’t sink in, but he understood that the game of trying to get me to come after him was over and there wasn’t any more fun in it so he got out.

Come Friday night when I was telling all the kids to get be ready to go to the pool at noon the next day I told Mafera he wasn’t going because he wouldn’t get out of the pool the last time. Now the full meaning what I said on Thursday came to him and it was heart breaking to see his face at this understanding. The next morning at 9am Mafera shows up at my door asking if he’s really not going to the pool, “Not this time, but you can go next time” I tell him. As I got ready to go do math at the high school he followed me around trying to appease me. Asking if he could take my bike out of the garage, “Yes, but you still can’t go to the pool” or if he can carry my backpack “Yes, but you still can’t go to the pool”. This is where the tough love comes in. It was much much harder for me to enforce the consequences I’d set up for him then it would have been just to hit him on Thursday at the pool and go on. Personally I wanted him to go to the pool and I told him that, but I also told him his actions last time meant that he couldn’t (in the end I did give him a two tennis balls to play with while we were at the pool, little consolidation given all the other kids on the street were gone and he had no one to play with).. However hard it was on me, and how ever much he hated me that Saturday morning I’m confident that he learned more from that experience then he did at school since the beginning of the year. And next time I ask him to get out of the pool, it won’t be a game of trying to get me to force him out, he’ll understand that there are consequences beyond, and worse, then physical force. And maybe, just maybe, someday he’ll apply this lesson to something of much bigger significance and because of that he won’t get HIV, won’t start smoking, or will achieve better in school and in that case I don’t regret that his long sad face as he stayed behind and we all walked to the pool

The total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.

This is a rather depression fundamental truth when extended to its final most absolute conclusion. But for at least the next 6 Billion years or so we don’t have to worry about that fact and therefor actually have much more pressing issues to worry about. But today I wanted to talk about the little localized anomalies to this generalized law otherwise known as human children and how they contribute to a massive increase in entropy through an amazing expenditure of energy.

One definition of entropy is a measure of the disorder and chaos of a system. Energy must be exerted in order for a system to obtain and maintain uniformity and order. Classic examples are a perfectly ordered deck of cards or an ice cube. The chances a shuffled deck of cards that is thrown on the floor and then randomly picked up being in perfect order is much closer to the chance that all the water molecules in my glass will suddenly arranging into the exact formation of ice at room temperature than the chance I’ll get a royal flush. In order to get that perfectly ordered deck or ice cube at room temperature energy must be used because those states are not naturally spontaneous. This means that the deck of cards and ice cube have lower entropy than the puddle of water and shuffled deck.

So what does this have to do with kids. First they are an example of a very low entropy system. What are the chances that the same amount of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, trace metals and other elements that make up a 3 year old randomly combine in just that way to make that unique and precious human being. So astronomically small that if you measure the economic value of all the complex proteins, intricately made cells, and everything else your DNA codes for and produces you could be worth $47 million, on the other hand if you just count just the basic elements and not the amazing way your body has arranged and uses them then your worth about $5. Second kids, and sometimes humanity as a whole though the final jury is still out on that one, tend to expend large amounts of energy not to create order but to create disorder and wreck havoc.

Now for the example from this weekend that provoked this whole train of thought. From somewhere a few of the kids on my street had scavenged the pieces to make a small push go-cart (I hear you saying Trevor, that’s a perfect example of human ingenuity being used to decrease entropy – please bare with me). The main core of the cart was an old discarded push lawnmower. The back axle on this lawnmower had worn through the plastic body and was falling out. I helped the kids fix it by basically sewing the axle in place with metal wire and pushed the kids around for a while. I took several pictures of the fixed axle and the kids playing with the cart.

The next day when I got back from work I found the cart completely demolished. One day of intense play was all it took. Granted the warranty on this car covered maybe its first 2 minuets of use and it wasn’t meant to last forever, but I figured it had more than a day in it. However, think of all it must have seen in its short existence as a children’s entertainment, and surly it was better than all the Teletuby episodes combined. It probable traveled the length of the street hundreds of times during the day. It was fought over, crashed into, sat on, jumped on, jumped over, pushed, pulled and enjoyed by at least 15 kids on the street. The back wheels probably feel of multiple times before it became impossible to hack them back on and then it was probably used more as a sled than a cart for a while. Once that wore the front wheels off dissecting the remainder of the car became much more of a game than strategically trying to build it up again. I know all this because I was once a kid and remember having jousting matches on the sidewalk with our big plastic big wheels, taking them to pieces in the process when I was 8. Here are some pictures of what the cart looks like now.

If you divide up a systems energy into that which does work, useful energy, and that which goes to wast, useless energy – in the context of productivity, advancement and the capitalist dream or just the elusive perpetual motion machine, than one interpretation of entropy is the useless energy. But think how much energy those 15 or so kids used up throughout the course of the day as they slowly and enjoyably destroyed their cart through natural play. Their play most definitely increased the overall entropy of the situation so what if any useful work did all that energy do. I believe it went into molding and shaping their mind and character. Through the course of a days playing they learned a few important lessons, might understand social interactions a little better, saw the value in having a cool play toy and learned what its like when that toy no longer works. Because of this one day they may grow up to be loving, carrying, socially engaged adult citizens. Who can actually judge the true value and worth of child’s play.

Now for a total change of subject on our current theme. As many of you may know my bike was plagued with a terrible case of increasing entropy. At last count the breaks didn’t work, it had no peddles, the gears wouldn’t shift into low gear with out me kicking the shifter while riding, the chain fell off frequently in high gear, and it was to small for me. I’m quite happy to report that I bought a new bike on Sunday. My host uncle owns a truck and took me to the mall in Nelspruit and the bike shop. The guy in the store tried to sell me a really nice bike with disk breaking, locking rear and front shocks and a host of other pretty nice things that also happened to be way out of my price range. I talked him down a few models by explaining I only needed this bike for another 17 months, wasn’t going to ride any races, and would only use the cash I had in the envelope in my backpack. Needles to say I am enjoying the new bike very much and hope to do a nice trip up the back roads in Barberton’s mountains soon. I’ll post about it when I get back, and I’ll probably tweet from the top.

I still have about 1 CD’s worth of podcasts from the 4 my Mom sent me at the end of August. So even though I’m trying to ration them a little yesterday during my weekend morning run I listened to this Speaking of Faith podcast about play. As it turns out that was an excellent choice because later in the day I would have an opportunity to observe some of the things Dr. Stuart Brown said about play and how important it is for the development of children. He said that children at play should be able to govern themselves and make up their own rules. That in most cases the kids themselves can take care of the playground bully and by doing so learn through play how to navigate and interpret the complex social dynamics of human society.

After a long day of reading and cleaning inside to avoid the heat outside I was feeling pretty restless and needed to expend some energy. I grabbed my frisbee and headed out to the street knowing that within seconds the neighbor kids would emerge. Instead of playing in the street like we had the last few times it was suggested that we go to the large field near by. So I set out with the three neighbor boys for the field. Now with so much open space the semi organized game of catch we had played in the confines of the street turned into a full fledged chaotic scramble of energetic 8 year olds. Someone would throw the frisbee has hard as they possibly could sending veering wildly in a random direction and everyone would run after it as it rolled around on the ground, who ever coming up with it in the end got to throw it as hard as they could.

Within about a minute of playing a few other kids had gathered watching timidly from the side. I tossed the frisbee over so it would land close to them and they could get it before the group of kids chasing after it got there and in this way the group of three that I started out with grew into about 20 kids. It was interesting how they were all about the same age ranging from 7-10 any older and they walked right by and younger and they watched and laughed but never tried to participate.

Since it was just that morning that I had listened to the Speaking of Faith on play as I played with them I watched with a much more critical mind the interactions between all the kids. The extroverted ones would climb all over me like the human jungle gym I am and ask an unending stream of questions. Others were shy and unwilling to even give me a hive five. Some would throw the frisbee with reckless abandon not caring about technique or where it landed, while others would ask me how to hold it and throw it correctly. Each and every kid had their own unique personality and it was truly amazing watching them interact.

Eventual some unspoken rules emerged. As long as the frisbee was in the air on on the ground everyone had equal claim to it, but as soon as someone had a firm grip it was theirs. And if two kids grabbed it at the same time a brief tussle would ensue. But very quickly kid would yield based on what I can only imagine is a complex equation involving all their past encounters, who most recently threw the frisbee, how firm each ones grip was and many other small factors I couldn’t see. The rules of play operate under their own enigmatic laws. Sometimes only two kids would run after the frisbee others everyone would scramble after it for reasons far beyond my comprehension.

It was great just to be playing for the fun of it. No one carried about wining or losing, and in fact there were no points to keep track of. If you didn’t get the frisbee on time all you had to do was try a little hard to the next to get it. All that mattered was that everyone was having fun and enjoying themselves.