Play for Peace (workshop report)

The Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre and PeaceWorks organized a three-day Play for Peace workshop on the 27th, 28th and 29th of June at Seagull’s Satish Mukherjee Road address. Play for Peace is a unique international initiative that teaches young children, especially in conflict-torn areas, to play together as a first and crucial step towards peaceful community-building. The Indian leg of Play for Peace is located in Pune and has previously worked with Hindu and Muslim communities in Hyderabad, riot relief camps in Gujarat and tsunami relief camps in the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

The workshop was conducted by Agyat and Swati (who prefer not to use their surnames as a stand against the prevailing caste system in India), youth facilitators of Play for Peace in India. Attended by a group of 26 people ranging from college students to NGO workers, the objective of the workshop was to learn playing community-building games, become aware of the psychological processes that lead to conflict, and finally learn to conduct these games in a way that avoids these processes and encourages children to play together irrespective of their differences in background and experience.

The first day of the workshop began with games that familiarize the participants with each other’s names, moved on to alertness games and group games requiring each other’s co-operation. These were punctuated with song-and-dance games, where the entire group came together with silly and fun lyrics and dance moves. The lyrics were simple, ridiculous, and often wordless onomatopoeic sounds (like “Aga Zumba Zumba Zumba…”) – the sort would that appeal to children of any background; otherwise they were kept within simple words in English or Hindi. The games, even the most competitive ones, were characterized by the absence of elimination – in short, nobody would get “out” or be humiliated for being less apt at playing than others. This practice was explained by Swati and Agyat as one of the “core values” of community-building games, the others being always ensuring the emotional and physical safety of the players, and always keeping an invitation to join in open to anyone who is interested. The participants were also taught how to introduce a new game to players, how to conduct it, and when to finish. By the end of the day’s workshop we had learnt 22 games and how to make others play them.

The second day concentrated on psychological experiences of conflict and how to deal with them. One exercise done on the first day had already given us a taste of it, when we were given a list of 15 essentials of day-to-day life and gradually eliminate the ones we could do without till we were left with only four – a tough ordeal; and then reminded that there were people in the world who did not have access to even those. The second day also began with new games, but these were awareness-building games. One game taught us how we succeed better if we pay more attention to our own growth than on stunting the growth of our peers. Another game divided us into four quadrants according to our individual stands on several debatable issues and encouraged us to share our opinions, but not with the objective to debate and win but to notice and learn to accept how different the opinion of a peer can be from ours. There were stories shared, penned by other Play for Peace volunteers from different places; and the songs learned were about peace, unity and the value of human life.

On the third day of the workshop, the participants were given a list of books, films and websites which will enhance our knowledge on child development, building peaceful communities, constructive thinking and such related topics. We were also taught how to create a report for each play-conducting session, so as to have a consistent log of data. Then, or the main part of the days session, we were divided into two groups and each participant in turn was made to demonstrate the skills of teaching and conducting a game, while his/her other group members posed as children. After this session, we sat and discussed various projects to carry forward our training with Play for Peace. Ideas were put forward, proposals made, and many of the participants came together in small groups to carry out certain projects, some of which are already on the way. Later in the evening, a group of visitors were welcomed at the workshop space and we practised our recently acquired play-conducting skills by inviting them to join us in our games. The day was concluded with a screening of Anand Patwardhan’s anti-nuclear destruction video Ribbons of Peace.