The School & Attention

This afternoon I took some pictures of the school playgrounds in front of my apartment windows. The grounds were strangely barren; there are usually tons of boys running around in the Elementary school.

They are playing, of course, football (soccer). These kids can ROCK that field with great skill. Throughout the day different age groups cycle playing here. After school a large group of men around 25 - 30 years come and play very competitive games.

All of these playtimes for every age group seem to be unsupervised. The only time I have ever seen adults with the children was during the Egyptian pledge:

The pledge picture was taken many weeks ago.

Kids seem to do what they want at this school. On busy days kids that aren't students here tease those inside by climbing over the wall and throwing sand. Sometimes, they will climb completely over the wall and chill in some trees inside the school grounds.

This kid decided to get on the roof. No big deal.


I don't usually see girls around, but when I do they are in this area. These few little girls in the school next door to the Elementary school are playing hopscotch. I got one right as she was jumping!

At this point, my presence on the porch had disrupted the flow of the children. I was taking a series of pictures of the girls to get a good photo, and while this was going on someone noticed I was there.

I got the beginning of the commotion in this following picture:


The boys stopped their game to climb over the wall and tell the girls I was photographing them. Great. After this, all of those boys you see on the right and girls on the left starts congregating at that corner, waving at me and saying things in Arabic I didn't understand.

I waved back twice, got some smiles and then went back inside.

They probably waited for me to come back for at least 10 minutes. After 15 minutes I saw the boys trying to start their game back up, but they were entirely to distracted to cooperate with each other. 20 minutes after they saw me, the boys had gotten into little groups and were wrestling with each other.

I had NEVER seen them wrestle before this.

So, we know what these 'little men' were doing. I felt a little bad that they knew they were being watched, and felt they had to impress me or prove whatever sense of dominance they needed to prove...

I probably won't go out there for a couple of weeks during that age group's play period. They were super, super cute though, let me say.


Always,
Candiace






PS - These are what precious Egyptian bananas look like when you have them on a plate and bend over.