You are part of my rear end

You are part of my rear end

We spent one morning at an orphanage/center for children who have unsafe situations at home. A volunteer who is just finishing his service works with the center, and part of his project was to organize the construction of an additional building where kids can sleep. I was in a bad mood when I arrived because of frustrations left over from the day before, but after playing with the kids for an hour my grumpiness was whisked away! We mostly just sang songs and played games with them, including Pato Pato Galinha (duck duck chicken, a Mozambiquified version of Duck Duck Goose) and a song about washing your hands, written by us:

Before you eat, wash your hands

After you go pee, wash your hands

Wash your hands, wash your hands

To be healthy, wash your hands.

It sounds better in Portuguese, and when you do the motions along with it. You’ll have to take my word for it. When we were teaching our games, the kids listened attentively and somewhat followed my explanations even though with my Portuguese it probably sounded something like “when me says ‘Simon said,’ to do the action that I does is doing it, and but more if me don’t not no says what said simon he did say, you has to can’t dos what the thing I did and does. It’s good understand?” I have to give a lot of credit to anyone who attempts to have a real conversation with someone learning a new language. It’s hard for both the learner and the attempting-to-listener. Initially, whenever I didn’t say Simon Says, they still all did the action, and I thought I had explained the directions badly. So it was a small gigantic accomplishment/surprise when one of the kids got up to be Simon, and when he didn’t say Simon Says some of them were not tricked into touching their belly.

Little by little, as my fellow trainee Mike always says.

The kids also taught us a few games. In one particularly memorable one, one person starts off as the snake who lost its tail (or rear end, depending on how you want to translate), and she points to someone and sings “you there, you are part of my rear,” and the chosen one crawls under the singer’s legs and becomes part of the rear. This continues on until everyone has crawled under all the legs and joined the end of the tail.