Fair play: Games help youth cross cultural & religious boundaries
by Ryan Miller

Charline Villanueva, John Henderson and MVS volunteer Maria Tschetter at Play for Peace at Roberto Clemente High School in Chicago. Photo: Ryan Miller

Older students learn to lead collaborative games that teach togetherness, so their training encourages cooperation and friendship. Younger students learn simply by playing. The games they play have no individual winners or losers, just teamwork that brings them together. It is restorative community justice, elementary-school style.

“If you start right away talking about Gandhi or transforming power, they won’t come back,” said Mark Paye, faculty organizer at Clemente. “When you’re playing games, you have fun.”

At Greenhill YMCA in Newcastle,Northern Ireland, where the Mission Network’s Melissa Law began a term in September, the games deliberately pair Protestants and Catholics, forcing alliances. A night line, where blindfolded kids must negotiate a trail by verbally passing instructions from one person to the next, teaches kids to trust. A wall to be scaled forces them to work together.

Brendan Gribben, Greenhill community relations development worker, said the youngsters get muddy and wet and get to bring out their inner feelings. Recently a Catholic teen from Portadown said she had learned to trust the Protestants in the room. More important to Gribben, she learned that her political views were stronger than she had realized.

“We want them to be confident in their identities and own them,” Gribben said. “We’ve had heated discussion. That’s what it’s about.”

Gribben was a committed Catholic who first met Protestants during youth worker training. Now, like Causby in Portadown, he trains other youths who are as hard-line as he was.

But not every story ends in success. One day Paye glanced out his Chicago school window. Seven floors below, a former Play for Peace student, now a gang member, was attacked and beaten in the school courtyard by a rival mob.

And several years ago, a group of sectarian girls attacked Gemma Procter, 17, with her Catholic and Protestant friends in a Portadown-area shopping center. They knocked her down and kicked her in the head because her friendships crossed boundaries.

“They tried to kill us,” she said.Procter works at the Portadown YMCA to teach a younger generation before they learn to hate, but she still sees her attackers around town — reminders of the pain beneath society’s surface.

“Someone has to scratch [the surface],” Watson said, “to open the wounds and allow young people to heal.”

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Highlights

Highlights

Return to Beyond Ourselves—Fall 2005