Reflecting upon…
The first week, we asked the younger kids at our school what they wanted in a new playground. They has some awesome ideas such as bungee jumping, trampolines, … but all a bit impossible. They were a bit confused that some lazy high school students were going to build a playground, in six weeks, for them!
Now, five weeks later, we’ve almost completed the playground and kids are already playing on it. They’re probably thinking ‘Why are they still working, I just want to play!’ Well of course they enjoy a playground that is made out of tires but more importantly made by their older school mates.
The process was surprisingly a lot of fun. At first I thought ‘Where did I get myself into? Six weeks of manual labour?’ but that vision al changed when we had our first workshop. More specific a bamboo workshop. I thought it was going to be just learning how to make a chair in bamboo for example. But when we got their we were split into two groups; the first group was going to learn how to sharpen a bamboe stick with a knife and the second group would design a bamboo structure that we were going to build after lunch. Of course I chose the second group. I began drawing a structure for kids to play on and later on we we’re allowed to make a miniature 3D form made out of small tooth picks and strong glue.
I’ve always thought of becoming an artist but after that workshop I certainly put it as an option for later. But also I thought that maybe it wouldn’t all be manual labour but also a bit of design.
But what I learned was that sometimes a bit of exercise isn’t as bad as you think. Getting dirty and sweat, by moving the tires, reminded me of a few years back, when I was in a youth group in Belgium called Chiro, where every Sunday we would come together and play games outside, mostly in the mud. I never thought moving tires could be fun, but it was.
After a few days always working outside in the hot sun, I got a bit tired of it. But we all wanted it finished so we kept going, some more than others. Some even when it was raining, not me…
I definitely learned how to bolt tires together with bolts and then you need to get the bolt in the hole to bolt it together with a bolt screwer and then you’ve got two tires that are bolted together, with bolts.
Another part of these 6 six weeks was: collecting animals, burying them, digging them up, dissecting them, putting them in hydrogen peroxide, taking them out of the hydrogen peroxide and looking at them. All in the name of science and art. I think this was the lost interesting part of the block, something more ‘relaxing’. Once you actually think that the bones you’re holding were once from an animal that was alive and happy, it gets a bit disturbing but you just don’t have to think about that.
As I don’t like working in the hot sun a lot, I mostly sat behind the desk looking at gooey scrambled frog and birds. You don’t normally do this at schools, you see a skeleton in your text book or you have one lying in your classroom already, but never really hands on dissecting and looking at every part, which I really liked.
Another big difference is that the teachers aren’t really your teachers anymore, they become your friends or they even feel like just you classmates. They help you with everything and are also genuinely excited for all the things that we do in LEAP.
I tink I would definitely take LEAP again some time next year, because the project is always different and you could get a lot of learning experiences from it.
Babette Vanderhaeghen
