Deaf kids, Swahili, and...musical chairs?

(Emily writing)

There is a small school for deaf children here on the island that Gwen has been visiting, and various other team members have taken turns joining her. Today was my turn!

And I have to say, I felt lost. Communicating in Swahili is hard for me, but I did study it, albeit casually, for almost a year. Communicating with deaf children who speak no English AND who speak no Swahili, but only sign Swahili, is...significantly more challenging. And not to say it's eas for Gwen; Tanzanian sign language has some signs in common with ASL, and the finger-spelling at least is about the same, but conversations are tough.

The school educates children from about age 5-20, grouped (it seems) in three classes: little kids, big kids, and old teenagers/young adults. A few can hear and speak a little, and a few of the teachers are hearing or can sign a little English, so we were able to get along.

The kids LOVE to play what we would call charades, involving acting, noises, and signs. Gwen acted out the familiar story about chewing gum (series of different people that get stuck to, etc) and the kids thought it was so hilarious, several of them chose that story to act out themselves! Apparently doing the same charade over and over is acceptable. They also liked our tag-team rendition of the wazungu boarding the daladala. Pretty funny, I know.

One adorable baby was wandering around with no pants on, and he was smiling at me (an oddity; usually our white faces scare the kids). His mother told me in Swahili, "pick him up!" So I did. Then she motioned for me to point him the other way (since he had no diaper on and she thoughtfully didn't want me to get squirted!) Anyway, his tolerance for the mzungu only lasted a few seconds before he sort of freaked out. I put him down and got a major dirty look; his mom was just amused.

We took the kids outside this afternoon to play some games. We started with relay races, but the "team" concept didn't quite kick in. Each member of team A would simply wait for his or her opposite number on team B to be ready, so it was more like a series of individual races; no team ever got ahead.

And then we had the bright idea to play musical chairs. Yes, with deaf kids. We arranged the chairs, demonstrated, and then Gwen and I were the "music" - we stood on opposite sides and waved our hands around and danced to indicate music was going on, and then when we dropped our hands the kids slammed into the chairs. And I do mean slammed; this was intense competition. You may not have ever seen a bunch of 10-16 year olds playing musical chairs in the US; it gets pretty physical! (We have noticed before that, while in some ways kids have to grow up much sooner, the whole "being too old/too cool" to do some childish activity is nonexistent here.)

So musical chairs was the hit of the afternoon. We probably need to come up with a new name for it, though...