The Build in China
This past September with a crew of 11 American volunteers and their children we built the first two Half the Sky outdoor adventure playscapes at institutions in Chongqing and Chouzhou. Rather than installing traditional playground structures we reshaped the landscape by creating hills, planting trees and shrubs, laying out meandering stepping stone paths, and placing whimsical sculptures and windchimes. Surrounded by a variety of textural plants, the children now have hidden gathering nooks, huge sand and water construction areas, a climbing wall and cute Chinese-styled playhouses for dramatic play. I wonder what the children are doing on the playscapes right now...
It all started with my first 3-week "observation" trip to China last spring. We knew we didn’t want to build "American" playscapes in China. We wanted to build Chinese-flavored spaces, so my goal was to take in China and blend it into a design for each site. I visited the cities, the countrysides, the children and the institutions, all the while imagining how to build these spaces and what they could be made from. When I asked Jenny what to expect before my visit, what to bring, what to be prepared for, all she said was "you’ll see". It turned out that I did. I explored the cities and saw people skinning live eels on the streets, men tearing apart old refrigerators for the insulation, a meat market, the Yangtze river flowing mudily through Chongqing, and men with Bamboo poles carrying couches, house plants and TVs to unknown destinations. I walked through farmers’ fields on paths that had been worn by feet for hundreds of years. I saw butterflies dancing among luscious, gigantic vegetation— each crop healthy and beautiful because it was cared for and tended to by hand. I thought about how every child needs that same loving attention. After visiting the institutions I saw that there was so much that we could do there to surprise the children and offer the caregivers new opportunities in which to provide that loving attention.
When I returned home it was time to put it all together. What did we have to work with? At Chongqing the outdoor play spaces were sunken courtyards with rubber tile over a concrete slab. The only way to get materials in to them would be through the building and up 2 stories. Ok. At Chuzhou, their current playground was a small patch of grass with squeaky-metal pinching welded structures, paint over rust. Ok. After spending time with the children I realized that not only did their spaces need help, but these children needed special opportunities to help them blossom. Because much of the routine of the institution seems largely based on collective group activities, I wanted to balance it and create a variety of intimate spaces with opportunities for small groups of children to get away from it all and be together. I wanted large sand areas to allow children to change their environment and build their own creations with enough room to work together or be by themselves. There should naturally be places for physical challenge, but there should also be curious, enticing areas to encourage imaginative, make-believe dramatic play. Thanks to all the work Half the Sky has already done the children are learning to be their creative selves. The outdoor environments should be an extension of Half the Sky’s indoor opportunities.
So after months of planning, plotting, worrying and wondering, it was suddenly time to go back to China to build. With a small "prep crew" of 5 including my wife and parents, we arrived 2 weeks early to begin searching for materials, plants, sculptures and workers. Would we find any of these things? Had the institutions been able to contact suppliers or laborers ahead of time? Were we crazy? Would we have any help? The answers: yes. Thanks to the hard work of ZZ and the staff of each institution we had good ideas of where to begin our various searches. Thanks to the hero of the project, Mr. Ji — our beloved translator, negotiator, comedian, friend — we were able to track down, visit, hire and order almost everything we were dreaming of. Oh sure, China doesn’t really sell much lumber. And sure, there really is no such thing as outdoor furniture (who in China has a back yard?). And sure, when trees are transplanted in China all the branches are cut off. And sure everything seems to take longer in China and 2-1/2 hour "rests" in the middle of the day could drive an American crazy. But by golly, we didn’t let those things stop us. We visited sculptors and described and sketched our ideas for "guardian" pandas (snarling lions perhaps too scary for toddlers...). We hiked through nurseries looking for trees and shrubs, Mr. Ji yelling "be careful!" each time I fell into a hidden irrigation ditch. We visited flower markets and hardware stores and hired contractors to weld special poles to hoist shade sails over the yards. We met with another famous sculptor to create "false mountains" for the children to climb on and hide inside of. He’d built a special Chinese garden in Seattle. The prep weeks were a roller coaster ride of excitement, disappointment, amazement and disbelief and our searches carried us in speeding taxis, a 3-wheeled motorcycle, mini MINI vans, a motorcycle with side car, spine-bouncing pickup trucks and a train. We were exhausted and glad it was over. Then came the volunteers and the actual build!
What a team! What a crew! (They didn’t kill us after the first day and that says a lot.) The rains had held off until the day before the volunteers arrived and then loaded the site with heavy mud and slime. Our day-one job: mud mountain-making with shaky shovels and cement-caked wheelbarrows. Slurp. But they did it: Volunteers shoveled gravel and gathered stone, laid sod and sanded log balance beams, mounted climbing holds on concrete walls, cut and fitted rubber tiles and arranged potted plants to create little rooms. Four of the volunteers’ children came along to spice things up: Jade, Mei, Saul and Maya. In between playscaping we had wonderful comic relief and often were serenaded by hotel lobby piano-playing, had the health benefits of stretching our muscles after succumbing to requests for arm-spinnings and hoistings, and were amazed (and entertained) at one child’s ability to eat hot spicy food. We even finished one day with a van ride back to the hotel filled with the singing of every kids’ and campfire song we could think of (and Bingo was his name-o).
The most rewarding part of the builds for many of us was the moment the children from Chuzhou were first introduced to the freshly completed playscape. The toddlers were led outside and down the ramp to where all the volunteers and staff were excitedly waiting. It was all going smoothly except that when they got to the new yard they didn’t seem to see it and just kept walking toward the old area with the rusted metal structures. "Over here! Look over here!" everyone was saying and turning them around to face the tea-house playhouse. Still they didn’t quite figure it out, and who were all these strange-looking tall people looking right at them and saying weird things? The children looked confused, then a few began to cry! Oh no!
What have we done? What did we just spend the last week of our lives doing? What were we thinking? My first urge was to sneak away and cry myself, but then the American girls began to slowly lead the Chinese girls one by one to the playscape, along the stepping stones past the banana palms to the sand area. A few slowly headed up the great hill to the giant double slide mounted in the side. After watching the first adventurers, first one child then another began to follow the leaders and make their own way to the yard, searching, looking, wondering. Sure enough, as they began to realize that this place was for them they grew more brave and curious. Soon sand was being shoveled and sifted and brought into the playhouse on trays. Children were pulling on windchimes, looking at the song birds in cages, and one by one sliding down the slide. The volunteers all watched from the edges and we were moved as we saw children exploring the landscape and materials in ways that they may have never done before. What does sand feel like between the toes? What happens when you add water to it? I can hug the elephant sculpture. I can walk the path by myself. I can sit with my teacher on the shaded bench swing. I can slide down the slide.
The project was hard work but it felt so good. On top of it we were even toasted by the mayor of Chuzhou and interviewed on TV and pictures of us were put on front pages of province-wide newspapers. Time and time again the interviewers kept coming back to the same point: that they could feel how much love we had to give. They were amazed that so many volunteers would travel from the other side of the world to give their time, muscles and hearts for the children of China and I even saw a TV man holding back tears after talking with one of the volunteers. Love knows no country bounds.
Rusty Keeler, October 2002
