To run, to fly

PINOY KASI

To run, to fly
By Michael Tan

Inquirer
Last updated 02:23am (Mla time) 07/18/2007

For years now, traveling around the country, what has disturbed me most about our governance is the lack of priority given to public spaces. In many towns, the most conspicuously absent are children’s playgrounds, an absence made even more alarming by the presence, in every town and city, of a huge cockpit arena. Cockfights over children’s play -- no wonder the country is so messed up.

In fairness, I’ve noticed that in the last few years more cities and towns, as well as richer subdivisions, have put up playgrounds. Sadly though, these playgrounds often seem underused, or even avoided. My article today will look at some of the reasons this happens, reasons that are so basic they end up being overlooked.

‘Mainit’

I’ll use Manila as an example. Sometime last year, I noticed that playgrounds had popped up throughout the city. They had swings and other play equipment, painted with eye-catching colors. Yet I could sense immediately that something was wrong. Most times when I would pass through, even on weekends, they only had a few children playing.

One weekend, I decided to put on my anthropologist-journalist hat and do a bit of cultural investigation. I visited three playgrounds and began interviewing the people there.

The parents and children did appreciate the playgrounds. What was so interesting was that several parents explained that they had grown up in rural areas and wanted their children to have a taste of their own childhood when they had spaces where they could run.

The children echoed their parents’ sentiments, and I could understand why. All of them were from urban poor communities, where there was no space at all to run, except the streets, which were too dangerous.

This doesn’t mean that playgrounds are only for urban areas. The need to run is so much part of our human evolution. (Why do you think people get such a high when they jog?) For children though, running is all the more important for conditioning their muscles and fine-tuning their motor coordination. Yet notice how in Filipino families we’re always warning children: “Don’t run, don’t run.”

Let me get back to the interviews. I asked the parents what they thought about the swings, slides and seesaws, some of which were quite fancy, even imported. “Maganda,” most of them replied, in a tone that suggested a polite “nice.” With more probing, I realized that some of them were actually afraid of the equipment. They feared the children falling. I assured the parents that children are usually quite good about calculating their risks, but I could see why they were worried, and I will get back to that point shortly.

I also asked the parents how often they came to the playgrounds. “Paminsan minsan" ["Occasionally"], most replied, citing busy schedules, whether in offices or in homes, as their main reason. But several also mentioned something I had been anticipating: “Masyadong mainit.” ["It's too hot."]

The heat. One could argue that there’s nothing you can do about that considering this is a tropical country. But I could see -- no, feel -- what the parents were saying. Even toward the end of the day, the playgrounds were hot and, worse, there was no shade. The playgrounds were actually built on places that used to have trees but our wise city officials cut them down. So what we now had were (I can’t call them playgrounds) empty lots with play equipment. This is in a country where parents fret not just about the heat but also about their children (daughters especially) becoming “maitim” [dark-skinned].

Modernity

Here then is some friendly advice to our local government and subdivision officials: Don’t drive nature out when you build playgrounds. It’s better for the children and it actually costs less to build ecologically friendly playgrounds.

The problem with many of our playgrounds is that they build on distorted concepts of “modernity.”

There’s a particularly useful Internet site (www.freeplaynetwork.org.uk) that interested mayors and parents can visit. Click first on “Places of Woe,” where they have pictures of what a playground should not be, and you’ll find they look exactly like our playgrounds: some steel swings and slides, no trees, and concrete floors.

Cemented grounds are said to be “safer” but I wonder. I thought about the parents I had interviewed in Manila’s playgrounds and realized their fears were not so much of the swings and slides per se than of the possibility that their children would fall off and land on concrete. It’s different if they fell on grass, or even on gravel and pebbles, which you find in natural settings.

All over the world, there’s been a trend toward playgrounds for “environmental learning” that sees the value of playgrounds with grass, stones and trees. The freeplaynetwork site describes playgrounds as places to engage with nature, to be sociable and solitary, to create imaginary worlds, to test boundaries, to construct and alter surroundings, to experience change and continuity, and to take acceptable levels of risk. All those functions can be reduced to one objective: preparing our children for adulthood and the real world.

If you use this environmental learning philosophy, then you realize you don’t need to buy expensive steel play equipment. So much of our “junk” could be recycled for the playgrounds as raw materials that the children can use to play with, from box crates (do you see kids building their own playhouses?) to used tires (do you see swings?). Last year, after the supertyphoons, we could have harvested the trees that fell. Branches as well as the trunks, when sawn off with different heights, are wonderful for children to climb, balance themselves on and jump off from.

Our skills at improvising should extend into play equipment, and we shouldn’t worry about imitating those expensive imported stuff. The Europeans emphasize the need to mimic the realities of natural environments in playgrounds: using uneven terrains for example, and in play equipment, having ladders with uneven spaces in between. That way, children develop not just their motor skills but also their ability to recognize depths and distances.

I’m going to talk more about these playgrounds on Friday, showing how they can be integrated into a broader plan of public spaces. For now, I hope our local government officials will get people to think more about properly designed playgrounds. For better or for worse, children never forget their childhood. Years from now, they will be telling their children, maybe even grandchildren, about the good mayor who first created this wonderland of a playground for them.

Maybe Unicef, the European Union and other European embassies can think of how they can help our officials to access materials on creating safe learning spaces for children, places where you can tell the kids: “Go run! Go fly like the wind!”