Géraldine Colin, GPJ Haiti
Anderson Andral (left), a professional musician, plays the traditional game of kay (Haitian Creole for house) with a young volunteer in the southern Port-au-Prince slum of Martissant. Andral collected several traditional games and, in 2014, launched a touring caravan of games called the Caravane de l’Art.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — In a small yard in the Martissant slum, kids are gathered outside playing games: hopscotch, hide-and-seek and dominos. Some are jumping rope and shooting marbles while the local bottle-top and string game ralba stand ready for action at nearby tables. At dusk, neighbor Richelet Lamarre, 63, will join in to entertain with folk tales, jokes and riddles.
Among the group is 12-year-old Joemaï Bonel.
“I love every second of Mortal Kombat and Game Master,” Bonel says. “These days, though, I find playing traditional games much more interesting.”
Bonel was introduced to the games four years ago when local musician Anderson Andral, 29, decided that local children busy with electronics should be introduced to some of the games that Haitians had played generations before.
With his father, Andral assembled a collection of board games, circle games and other old-fashioned ways kids once passed the time, and together they launched a touring caravan of games in 2014 called the Caravane de l’Art.
For a month each year, the caravan departs from the capital Port-au-Prince, and tours throughout the country, visiting areas including Jérémie, a city at the tip of Haiti’s southern peninsula, the seaport Les Cayes, and coastal Léogâne, about 42 kilometers (26 miles) west of Port-au-Prince.
Bonel says he especially likes to play the traditional game of ludo with his grandfather and mother. Ludo is a board game of strategy. In it players move tokens by rolls of a single die and players vie to have all four tokens reach the finish line first without being “eaten” by their foes and hence sent back to the start of the game.
The intergenerational nature of the games and the fact that the games are not played alone is in contrast to computer games, apps and video games that often isolate children.
Ursule Jean, 37, says the caravan helped her two shy children meet new friends.
“I was at a loss how to find conversation topics that could ignite my first-born son’s interest,” she says. “Aside from school homework that preoccupies his time, he spends a lot of his time watching TV and playing video games.”
The traditional games bring Jean closer to her children by creating “a welcoming space for conversation between my kids and myself. My son gets to know and interact with other people,” she says.
The reconnection helps, she says, because it is hard for a parent to control their children’s use of mobile phones and “hard to know the kind of people our kids interact with” online.
“As a mother, reconnecting with traditional games means a lot to me,” Jean says.
The traditions in the caravan, including the game of kay, fairy tales, and popular folktales, such as Tezin Nan Dlo, are part of Haiti’s heritage that the nation risks losing if not transmitted to younger generations. Kay is a game much like mancala in which two lines of shallow holes are dug in the ground and items are distributed with rules in which one player tries to capture the other players’ pieces.
Tezin Nan Dlo is an oral Haitian tale that is embellished depending on the speaker. Central to the tale is the story of the friendship between a girl and a fish who bond after the fish rescues the girl’s ring, which had accidentally fallen into the deep water. The fish helps the girl take clean water to her family but because of jealousy, the story ends with the earth drenched in tears.
Louis Lecoin, a history of art lecturer at the Ecole Nationale des Arts, the national arts school, who also is the head of museums in the Bureau National D’Ethnologie, the government’s ethnology office, says games help children get back on track and enable them to cope with challenges.
Caravan of games creator Andral says his favorite is kay, as it allows him to think strategically. He enjoys seeing children play the games of his youth.
“Today, very few young people remember the games we liked so much in the countryside, and young people are emotionally attached to their smartphones. Real-life conversation has died due to WhatsApp or Facebook,” he says. “I hope that one day we will have a platform to preserve all our traditions.”
Ndayaho Sylvestre, GPJ, translated this article from French.
