Necessary Playgrounds

Greg Mortensen, an American, author of the best selling books, “Three Cups Of Tea” and Stones into Schools”, has been able to build at least 130 schools, most of them for girls, in one of the most dangerous regions in the world – the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. This place is known to be the heart of the Taliban country and where many of the most wanted terrorists are trained. In his books, Greg describes how he and his team from this region were able to build the schools and how they were able to get permission from armed groups to allow their young girls to come to these schools. Here is an excerpt from the book Stones into Schools:

“Since the spring of 2006, we’ve incorporated playgrounds into most of our new schools, and we have also been working to retrofit a few of our existing schools with swings, seesaws and slides. Our loyal donors love this idea and have been more than happy to chip in. The playgrounds have also won fans in some unexpected quarters.

In the summer of 2009, for example, a group of elders who sympathized with the Taliban paid a visit to one of our schools in Afghanistan with a request to tour the facility. As they walked into the compound and put down their weapons, the leader of the delegation, a man named Haji Mohammad Ibrahim, spotted the playground and broke into a big smile. For the next half hour, he and his companions gleefully sampled the swings, the slide, and the seesaw.

When they finally quit playing, Haji Mohammad Ibrahim announced that they did not need to see the inside of the school. “But don’t you want to take a look at the classrooms?” asked the principal. “No we have seen enough,” replied Haji Mohammad Ibrahim. “We would like to formally request you to come to our village in order to start building schools. But if you do, they absolutely must have playgrounds.”

Where did this wonderful idea come from? Well Greg had a young daughter named Amira and she asked Greg one day what the children in Pakistan do for play.  Finding out from her father that there were no playgrounds in the school she told him that there absolutely must be playgrounds,“all children need to play, especially ones that are suffering and hurting like the kids in Pakistan.” Greg admitted that in their effort to build the schools, lay water distribution pipes, work out the red tape, his team had forgotten one of the most essential facets to a school – play.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reported that free and unstructured play is healthy and in point of fact help children reach important social, emotional, and cognitive developmental milestones. Play also helps the individual manage stress and develop resiliency.

An organization that consents to the practice of strategic free play to transpire in connection with idea generation, problem solving, situational analysis, and brainstorming increases the possibility of a better creative harvest for itself.

Including play in your organization stimulates the creative output of the individual. Play gives permission for your organization to first identify the box and then think out of it.

Call Dada to know how you can introduce play in your team and reap the benefits that come with it.