Catching Up

Hard to catch up! Been having very busy days lately. As much as I want to write in detail, I find it super hard to keep up with thoughts and feelings that I would like to share with you.

What is Barnga? /barn-ga/

We had no idea what Barnga was ... but it turned out to be really interesting! It was a tournament card game set up to be a simulation of culture shock and adaptation to new environments.

(Now this game only works best if you have no idea about how it is played ... but I badly want to tell you about it. So I just wish you'll forget about everything I wrote when the time comes that you have to play it...)

The cast was divided into 9 groups in separate tables. Each table had a deck of cards and a set of rules. Everyone reads the rules and starts playing -- the catch.. there should be NO TALKING.

After a certain amount of time, winners move one table up (i.e. winner in Table 4 will move to table 3) and losers move one table down. The objective of each person is to reach the highest possible table, Table 1.

Sounds pretty easy, right?

But what we soon found out was that each table had DIFFERENT RULES! and nobody was allowed to talk...

Imagine coming into one table oh so confident with what you know only to realize that you have no idea how things are. You end up totally clueless , frustrated, feeling stupid, and sometimes become defensive and argumentative.

Sort of like finding yourself in the middle of a different culture, a strang country, or a different group of people.

Cross the Line

Now this was an exercise in diversity... a line was drawn across the floor and we all stood on one side. The facilitator started askin

g questions and everytime that you feel that the situation / question applies to you, you have to cross the line to the other side.

After you have looked at each person who crossed the line or remained in one side... everybody goes back to where they were.

The questions were pretty light at first, such as:

Cross the line if you are:

a woman.

an Asian.

an American.

feeling homesick.

But after a while, things started to get intense when the following questions were asked:

Cross the line if:

ever you or you had a friend who was discriminated against because he was gay.

your parents are no longer together.

you have ever experienced discrimination.

you have ever felt misunderstood.

you think you are minority in the area you live in.

And you can feel hesitation and emotion in the air... What people realized in this activity was how we all seem different in the surface , but once you peel off the layers --> there were more similarities between people than we thought.

Ah, man is truly a multidimensional being... I hope someday we realize that beyond our differences, we have something special and common inside ourselves. And maybe (just maybe) this realization can make us empathize with each other and give way to world peace ;-)