the diary of a traveling dreadhead: Game Changer

Before I left for Surkhet in January, I was reading a book called Little Princes that is set in Nepal. Throughout the book, the author regularly mentioned Carom board, a table game similar to shuffle board in which you flick little pucks into corner pockets. The book made it seem like everyone in Nepal had a Carom board, so I wasn’t surprised when I arrived at Kopila and all the kids were avid players. It was all Carom board, all the time. When the kids were bad, we took away the Carom board for a week and they died a little inside.

But what did surprise me was when the Carom board became old news a few weeks later. One day they were obsessed, the next day the board was pushed behind the TV to collect dust. Carom board was out, and jump rope was in. And it wasn’t just a few kids here and there who made the switch, the change was drastic and obvious, as if the kids in Surkhet had a secret meeting and all decided they needed a new game. After breakfast, the kids were jump roping. At school, even teachers were jump roping. After school, before dinner, sometimes even in the dark, the kids were always jump roping! I tried to figure it out. Maybe the warmer weather made them want to be outside? Maybe Surkhet received a new shipment of jump ropes?

One morning I came downstairs to jump rope with the kids and showcase my talents before school. To my dismay, the kids weren’t congregated in the side yard and the jump rope was nowhere to be found. Instead, the kids were scattered about the house taking apart old bike tires and roping the rubber bands together. The new fad had arrived: chungi. It’s like hacky sack, you see how many times you can juggle the chungi without it falling on the ground. It was the first time I had ever seen the game played with old tire pieces, but it was clear the kids had played this many times before. On my first try, I juggled twice and was pretty happy. Then a 4-year old got 36 juggles and I cried. Forward, inset, eyes closed, sidestep, with claps, with a partner – the kids had all different variations of juggling and impressed me every time.

A few weeks later, chungis were replaced by rubber bands tied together for a game called “rubber ping”. Then the obsession switched to a pile of tiles and a sock ball (“kitiball”). Then a game in which players only need one stone and some dirt and really no coordination (“aram”). And now we are in the middle of rock – or gohti - season. It’s jacks but with rocks and I guarantee any Nepali kid could beat you, they have mad skillz. One of the moves looks like this: toss a rock in the air with one hand and use that same hand to scoop up four other rocks on the ground and shoot one of those rocks into a hoop formed with the index finger and thumb of the other hand before catching that very first rock that was thrown in the air with that very same hand that did the throwing. It blows my mind how gravity ceases to exist when they play rocks yet comes crashing down (literally) when I attempt.

In 6 months we’ve gone from Carom board to jump rope to chungi to rubber ping to kitiball to aram and now gohti, and who knows what’s next or when it will come. I know all the 90s kids remember the evolution of our games: there were pogs and tomagachis, Polly Pocket and American Girl Dolls, baseball cards then pokemon cards. It’s always changing but you can never quite predict what will stick next. You spend hours and hours perfecting your Skip-It technique to showcase at recess, and the next day it doesn’t even matter because all the kids are learning how to feed their gigapets hamburgers and watch them poop. And soon enough, everyone’s trading that toy for the newest version of Bop-It.

Fads are funny; they are everywhere, but I can’t help but see the contrast between here and home. Our games had batteries included or required a desktop computer and you could play all day long without burning a calorie, and if your parents didn’t spend a huge chunk of change at Toys R Us, you certainly could not keep up with the latest fad. It’s refreshing to be here, in a place where the kids are resourceful, creative, active, and can turn what I would consider garbage, into the most prized possession of the month. I guess Maggie did it right by raising her children in Nepal…