Getting to know the base structure

Its amazing how much things can surprise you, even when you're supposedly ready for anything. I've left the country before, and I've played with children from different cultural contexts, but the smiles and laughter that arose from a game of Jenga played in the Mission the other day made me pause.

We had a lot of fun building and redesigning the small wooden tower according to our estimations of structural integrity, or rather, whether the tower looked wonky on that side and when the whole thing came crashing down, we all grabbed as many pieces as we could to get it back into shape for another round. I love board games, I always have, which is why the boys' laughter, finger-pointing, and "helpful" suggestions surprised me... I never expected to see such similar behavior to my own. What a gift to be able to step into a new job and instantly have a point of contact, and once more, not just a point of contact, but a shared connection of pleasure and joy.

If you've never played Jenga before, ask the nearest kid to help you find a set and play, and if you haven't played it in a year or longer, do the same. A collection of small wooden blocks say so much about the way that we relate to each other and our world, both through the building and the rebuilding that takes place over the course of the game. The blocks themselves are ingenius because they are so plain... planks that could come from almost any material on earth, without any complicated silicone chips or protective equipment required. Their simplicity nevertheless is quickly converted into structure by even the smallest hands in the furthest of lands. Can you imagine a location on earth in which you couldn't play this game? After three weeks in Argentina, I find myself asking this question for the first time, gleefully realizing that Jenga has a power to transcend boundaries placed on us by nationality, geography, ethnicity, language, and class.

And while the Mission has been a place of joyful congregation, fellowship and play, the social reality of the Barrio and of Resistencia makes me realize that Jenga has more to tell us than we ever could have imagined as children. The Mission where Angela and I will be working (especially Angela) is located in a neighborhood called Barrio Juan Bautista Alberdi (Barrio means neighborhood in Spanish and Alberdi was a president of Argentina in the 19th C.), a poorer part of the city where many people have built lives for themselves in small houses. While this reality is utterly breathtaking for us as privileged US citizens (we have to be honest about that fact, Angela and I have been blessed with wealth, love and opportunity relative to this community, and most around the world) there are communities far worse off in this city and in the surrounding province of El Chaco. Resistencia is the poorest provincial capital in the country, and the capital of the poorest province. As part of my work with the Centro Nelson Mandela, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that studies environmental and human rights abuses, I am bombarded every day with more facts about the dangerous processes that are crippling the livelihood of these communities.

Take, for example, the case of an industrial park in a neighboring town. This town lost most of its factory jobs in 1991 and has been economically devastated by unemployment, inflation and the consequential social service fallout. This town is thrilled to have the opportunity to have an industrial park in their community and are actively campaigning for its construction, which will surely bring jobs and dignity back to a group of people who have experienced a great amount of humiliation and pain. But the first plant that will be installed in this park is likely a Brazilian enterprise that makes steel, a venture that was stopped by their own government because of the dangers that it presented to the environment. If it were to be built, it would certainly mean the destruction of thousands of acres of the natural woodlands and sustain the soils of the interior of the province, destroying the livelihood of thousands of people, forcing them to abandon their homes to move to the city to find work, and the cycle repeats.

So where does Jenga come in? Any tower ever built was constructed according to some kind of plan and with a certain amount of materials. From Babel to the Empire State Building to the new education wing on the church, there is a plan and materials. And as we are told time and time again by both architects and pastors, what we have at the base is the most important. Rock or sand? Reinforced concrete or adobe? Do we build a society by offering employment, or by watching out for the environment? By raising taxes to pay for social services or by encouraging investment that will make those social services unnecessary? These are the questions that divide us politically and ideologically and none of them can be answered by anything as simple or narrow-minded as a blog post. And yet, in our own minds, the solutions to these problems appear as elegant as a Jenga tower.

Seriously, pull the game out of the closet and play a round with a friend. We can learn a lot from the simplicity AND the complexity of a game like Jenga.