Do we
have enough space for children to play? Are we ready to let the children play?
Can we sit down and enjoy the extra co-curricular activities of our kids?
On
Sunday, I was travelling to Nairobi. Just at Nyayo stadium, there was this huge
traffic jam, which of course is a nightmare to parents on such a day when they
are taking their kids on a stroll. This jam has of course created employment to
a number of hawkers who brandish their wares on motorists. From peanuts to car
spare parts and of course the very noble kids wares. So this couple is held by
jam, and a hawker brandishes just the right product! A ball, we have peculiar
behaviour though, the balls we buy are never for the foot or leg, but for water
polo, anyway, the child demands to own one and the mother buys.
Now the
child has a football eer water polo ball, don’t ask me its name, all I know is
the ball is meant to be kicked, the Kenya way. I remember when we were young;
we kicked even the basketball, volleyball and the handball. Then we had the
fields. Where we the child play the ball?
This
child is from a middle income earning family. Maybe they were coming from a
picnic at the Nairobi National Park. They live in a gated compound, or maybe
flat that borders a marshland behind and a street in the front, the shoulders
are bordering such buildings too in Eastlands. Maybe if they have grass, which
I doubt because almost has a car, the landlord or the owners have put a sign,
“DON’T STEP ON GRASS” So this child is reduced to playing on the streets, that
is if maybe, they have the liberty to play.
One
thing I am certain is that not every parent will let the children to play. The house
helps will be quick to curtail all manner of game be it, NOT DIRTY. Young kids
have therefore been reduced to sleeping zombies.
The ban
on holiday tuition clearly shows the inability of the country to think out a
policy. Nowadays we have numerous diseases which affect both the young and the
old. Diabetes spares no child. I am
emphatically against holiday tuition but my concern is what next?
We need
to come up with policies that offers solutions and not just stops what we feel
is not good and inappropriate. The holiday tuition yes, has its flaws; it has
made many of the brilliant minds become redundant. The tuition itself offers a
buzzing zzzzzzz of hands off studies which is more or less spoon feeding the
students/pupils with answer question phenomena. A child gets out of school with
an electronic mind of answering questions yet there is nothing educational
about the answering. The extra tuition rehearses and sings the song of how to
pass and not the part of understanding. Yet we are quick to jump in jubilation
when these automatic answering machines come out successfully. What I have
learned in this field of teaching is that even secondary exams can be crammed
and recited like the Apostles Creed.
As we
wipe out the extra coaching we should come up with the leisure part. Looking
around Nairobi, our primal thought, there are a number of places the game part
of play could be hosted. Don’t mention Uhuru park or Jamhuri park, they have
paedophiliac kind of smell. Jee vanjee has weapons of mass destruction while
Arboretum has been romanticized so much. That leaves us with the Village
Market, Sarit Centre and Westgate. How then can you play in a mall? Besides, these places have hefty fees of upto
Kshs. 200 an hour! In Kisumu, a disaster
is brewing while Eldoret let us not talk about it. That leaves us with Kakamega
which has the Bench has got a new meaning.
We
therefore need to build facilities for recreation and guard them with our lives
before we think of killing this bondage of holiday tuition!
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