Designing and Cleaning football court2.Day 1-2

Day 1 : Cleaning the playground

Day 2 : Dreaming and Cleaning the playground

On day 1 we continued cleaning up the playground. It was an attempt to get more attention from people in the area and show them that it is possible to transform places if we all work together. Luckily that day some teenagers we had met before passed by the site and wanted to join us cleaning the area. We became a big group of all ages: little kids, older kids, teenagers and 3 adults.

Other members of the community also contributed to the work by providing us with neccessary tools such as spades, brums, water, garbage collectors and carts to carry out the garbage. We on the other hand took with us working gloves and plastic bags for the garbage. It was a messy day but we all ended up doing a lot of work and could start noticing some small but meaningful changes in the site.

Before going home we had a group discussion where we all talked about our impressions and thoughts for the day, as well as planning for the next day. As we wanted the adults and the teenagers to take more responsibility for the work and the kids, we agreed with P Kao to meet ealier next morning so we could plan together the workshop and afterwards meet up with the kids to design the playground and afterwards continue with the cleaning.

We started the day with meeting up P Kao and told her about the plan and tried to get her involved with the planning. We asked if she could be the person who explained what we were going to do to the others as we thought we were too new to the place and there should be someone from there to start making something. She seemed to understand and agreed to join us.

We started the first workshop at the school at the corner near the playground as it was too hot outside.

We got a room for about 2 hours from the cleaning lady in the school.

The first workshop was to ask the kids to draw the their own 'Dream Playground' and present it to everyone. There were only 3 teenagers involved this time, the rest were little kids.

It was again a mess, but better than the day before. The kids were talking and talking and never stopped. We tried to make them calm down a bit by making them clap their hands and sing the A-Z song.

At 12:00 and after everyone had presented their drawings, we ended the workshop. Most kids were aready hungry and some of them started to run around and wanted to go home. Some had actually runned home to pick up their lunch and bring it to the workshop.

At 14:00 we started with the second workshop. We divided the group into 5 smaller entities and asked them to draw their 'Dream playground together'. At this time we had no available space, since the school was already closed, but we managed to do it in front of the old library under the only shaded space we found!

Some kids presented their ideas, while others were to shy to do in front of the others. We got some really interesting proposal for the transformation of the area, among the most creative there was one to bring professional football players from England and France. We are working on that one!

The idea of the workshop this time is not just a workshop to gather ideas from them about how they wanted it to be, but to try to make them to come and try to work together, so that they know who would be involved in using the space - not just the big boys but the little kids too.

At around 4 pm we started the cleaning, after the group presentation and some discussion about how we were going to make it into something they already dreamed. We divided ourselves into 2 zones - inside and outside. The big boys took care of the inside garbage dump while the little ones took care of the area around the playground.

We created a Garbage Collecting competition to inspire them to compete each other. We put up a score board on the wall and counted the number of the bags they could make.

The really cool thing is that the little kids they went back to their houses and collected the garbage from their houses, which means the garbage was not only taken from the playground but from their houses!

We did quite a lot today altogether. Ended it with having a discussion of how they thought about it again. We think some of them started to get a bit connected to the area. Some of them asked when we would do it again.

And Carla and Mario were in invited to have dinner at P Kao's house.....