Soul Food Friday is a weekly happening hosted at our home, a small, family-owned and operated farm/homestead, situated in the hills of a coastal region of western Puerto Rico on the border of two towns: Rincon and Aguada.
This corner of the island – and the town of Rincon specifically – has a demographic atypical of the rest of the island, including large numbers of immigrants/ex-pats/’gringos’ from the United States following a five decades-long history as a celebrated surf spot.
Rincon’s population is around 14,000, a figure that swells to up to 20,000 during the busiest weeks of the winter (dry) season months, to include several thousand temporary residents/snowbirds/seasonal workers and vacationers.
Despite the glossiness of the town’s tourist getaway image, the presence of some higher end restaurants and lifestyle businesses, and some very substantial properties in a few enclaves, 52.3% of Rincon’s resident population live in conditions of poverty, compared to 14% in the mainland US, and 43.5% island-wide. Median household income was reported in the 2012-2016 census at $17,784, coming below the island’s median household income of $19,606 for the same period, and $56,516 for the United States.
Between 2010 and 2015, Puerto Rico closed 150 schools, in response to the debt and economic crisis that the island faced. This economic situation was worsened further by hurricane Maria, and the government announced a further 305 schools billed for closure after the storm. This figure represents a quarter of the island’s schools. Puerto Rico’s children are seeing their neighborhood schools close, and are traveling now on buses to be delivered to enormous establishments serving a very wide area.
With teacher shortages, power and water outages, and a significant lack of resources, materials, and funds, schooling in PR is in a crisis of its own. Many children are leaving the island with their families in order to attend public schools on the mainland, as well as leaving the island’s school system to pursue home education.
This is especially the case for children with special needs of all natures, as funding for special educational needs has been cut drastically. There is therefore very limited provision due to lack of resources, under-staffing, and large class sizes.
These figures are alarming. It is for this reason that Finca Maravilla offers a range of educational experiences by donation only, with clear onus on the fact that no child will be turned away for lack of funds, ever.
This is the principal premise behind our non-profit status and on our fundraising efforts in the United States and in the rest of the world.
We hope to raise the funds for our organization to be able to offer our services to larger numbers of children, by using raised funds to cover staffing costs both here on the home-farm, as well as enabling us to take our programs into schools.
Soul Food Friday was our initial offering here at the farm, and began as a response to the collective trauma experienced during hurricane Maria. In the immediate aftermath, these Fridays served as a healing avenue for the young people who found themselves displaced from their homes and schools and regular lives over the course of a few day storm lockdown and the devastation that the storm had reaped.
All of the local public schools were closed, and most other independent schools were also closed for a duration before reopening to offer a scaled-down week and a reduced curriculum.
Many families fled the island seeking refuge or respite with family or in second homes in the US (an estimated 250,000 Puerto Ricans have left since Maria). Friends disappeared often without goodbyes, birthdays passed, friendship groups were disrupted, and everyone was experiencing some degree of shock or trauma.
Many people were in dire need of basic necessities – food, water, diapers, medicines, cleaning supplies. There were families without roofs or basic shelter, many living in temporary housing situations (many are still). Noone had electricity, running water, or communication channels, and gasoline was so scarce that those who felt the need spent hours on end in gas lines trying to secure gasoline for their vehicles or generators. Many more went without entirely.
People, including the very young, elderly, and infirm walked long distances in sweltering heat to relief centers for supplies, where they then waited in lines for hours with no shade or water, with the weakest often fainting from heatstroke and dehydration. In short, life changed considerably, overnight.
My husband and I and our two children survived the storm in our home, mercifully with all animals accounted for and with no damage to property. Our land did not fare so well, losing many of its shade and fruit giving trees, as did the whole island.
Emerging from the house following Maria meant stepping out onto a wholly new landscape and exploring a brave new world, one in which not a leaf remained on any tree, vistas were totally altered, mountain hideaways became homes with sweeping, ocean views, and ‘steps from the beach’ became ‘in the ocean’.
We were truly humbled by the power and magnitude of this ferocious expression of the power and might of mother nature. We were inexpressibly grateful for the safety that our home had afforded us, and we willingly accepted the opportunity offered by the earth to sweep clean, blow off the old systems, and build anew.
Building anew, for us, meant:
- slowing down our existence and increasing our workload to fall in step with the daily demands of keeping a family of four, and all our farm animals, fed, watered, clean, and in good health without any of the conveniences and structures that modern life affords;
- picking up fallen branches and sticks one by one, and slowly and surely, steadily clearing and restoring and reshaping the land in her new image;
- building extensive gardens, bed by bed, transforming a rocky and barren hillside into an area of burgeoning food-scaped abundance, using the raw materials left by Maria (branches and leaves), the manure from our animals and donated seeds;
- switching from an alternative and half-hearted connection to the locally offered schooling, to joyfully unschooling our two children, aged 8 and 5;
- seeking alternative, renewable energy solutions – we are now fully solar-powered;
- seeking rain catchment solutions; we have survived with our own DIY, pirate-rigged rain catchment set-up, and with a local spring. Next step – permanent solutioning;
- offering our home as a space for children and their families to come together, heal, create art, relax, and eat good food (which was very scarce for several months following the storm).
Over the past six months, the work of Soul Food Friday has evolved considerably, at a very natural and organically flowing pace.
We have gone from a true family day in those early weeks: where all parents were present, everyone brought a vegetable to add to the pot, and soup was cooked over a fire in the yard; through various stages of adaptation as children left, returned, went back to school; to now, where we have a stable core group of 11-12 homeschoolers, and social patterns and groupings, identities, and behavioral mores that are beginning to form therein.
Soul Food Friday is a unique program, consisting of art-based group activities, group work, and unstructured play.
The day follows a ‘natural breath model’ of in-and-out, inhale-exhale; oscillating naturally between unfettered freedom, and quiet, attentive group work, mindful speaking and listening activities, and gentle care of animals. From big to small; wild to self-contained; out to in; and back again, and again.
This core group consists of 12 children ranging in age from 5-15. The bulk of the children are in the mid-range, ages 8-10, and all bar one of this group of seven children are male. So, half of the group consists of boys aged 8-10.
In the last couple of weeks, there have been some changes in the way that the group relates, with this mid-range group of six boys settling into some behavior patterns around power and conflict, dominance, and survival that are interesting and present a key opportunity for the growth and development of the group culture, and for the personal growth of the individual children involved.
The week of 9th March involved an activity of building gnome and fairy houses. The group of boys divided into a two/three split (with one of the boys choosing to work with one of the older girls on a fairy house in another part of the land) and the building commenced.
The group of two began taking considerable care and attention over the outcome of their building, where the group of three, after a strong start from one of the boys, appeared to tire with the project quickly. From this point, they were more concerned with the destruction of the other group’s house.
The group of two responded defensively and a literal (play) ‘battle’ commenced, with both groups creating small battling rams and missile launchers out of sticks, in order to launch leaves, small stones and dry clods of horse manure(!) at the ‘others’!!
For the group of three, group A, this battle became the main focus of the afternoon; for group B, this became a ‘necessary’ activity in order to defend their project and build the house they envisioned.
Group A were not happy with the house they created and turned their energies instead to the destruction of the other house.
Group B were happy with the house they were building and unconcerned with the house that the other group was building, yet sought to defend their right to build and attacked the other house in retaliation.[*1]
These events were an interlude in the afternoon spanning approximately 15 minutes. It was a moment that I decided to let simmer, in order to see what came of it the following week.
No child came to me to report what had happened, neither did anyone present any signs of hurt feelings, eroded confidence, or submissive behaviors in the group dynamic once we came back together for the next, ‘in’ activity. So I made the decision to let my covert observations remain undisclosed.
During the following week’s activities, 16th March, I allowed the same sub-group, this time with all six boys present, to roam to the furthest area of the property from the house to play freely together for ten minutes. During this time, what a couple of the children involved (the B group children from the previous week) described as a ‘war’ commenced. No one was injured. This was organized, oppositional, tribe-like play, where battle lines are drawn by unspoken agreement (the same lines as the previous week, groups A and B).
The climate of this nature of play is inherently volatile, where an initially ‘fun’ (but edgy) game-like play ensues, in which dominance roles are fought over; and where play sooner or later spirals into a place that is unnervingly ‘real’ or hostile.
This new realm of play in can be emboldening for some, yet fearful for others. The lines between play and life begin to blur, and adult intervention is required to ensure the smooth transition into a constructive place and a cohesive outcome for the group.
This leads me to these questions:
- Where does this pseudo-violent, inter-tribal, oppositional play come from? What does it serve?
- Is it harmful?
- Is it inherent in human animal nature, or does it come from societal structures?
- Is this the very root of the culture of bullying that we see in our society at large, and in our schools?
- What is required from educators and carers in order to transmute these forces and help children create the social structures that best benefit the whole?
The true work, for me, lies not in theorizing the possible answers to these questions, or in generating sweeping statements/rules as to how an institutional model may best standardize its response. My focus is on the practical handling of the effects and impulses of the behavior itself, i.e. how can we use this phenomenon *consciously* as educators to further children’s self-knowledge, deepen their awareness of their own soul’s own journey, and increase a sense of unified group harmony, while honoring the unique differences of each individual?
Instead of group shaming; instead of the ’tabooing’ of the very notion of conflict-driven play; instead of pushing this impulse to the furthest reaches of the individual and group psyches, to a place where it may lie coiled up and ready to strike without forewarning and – moreover – without consciousness at a later stage of human development; what if we were to embrace it?
What if we choose to accept, recognize, integrate, examine, explore, play with, and transmute these energies in order to move a group into a new realm of play? And play, for children, is life.
What if we up level? What if we begin to learn to look at our deepest selves in relation to our community in responsible, earnest, respectful, and insightful ways, with lightness and love and a spirit of playfulness?
Can we allow children their own growth by offering our wisdom as catalyst for transmutation, rather than source of disapproval or agent of control or coercion, however well-disguised?
Can we accept, as educators, that we are learning *about* children from the children themselves, rather than bringing a *pre-established knowledge* of children to the classroom and observing them through that pre-existing lens?
Am I unschooling myself, as an educator? Yes, I am. This journey is truly a trip.
Our next Soul Food session will encompass a different group dynamic.
In the coming weeks we will be exploring some of these ideas in our circle. We will be looking at the way we have been playing and the patterns we have fallen into. We will be doing this with lightness and with age-appropriate techniques and vibrations, through drawing, map-work, drama, speaking and listening round table discussions, gratitude, positive reinforcement, and whole-child attention.
I will record the flow of our coming together and the course of Soul Food Friday’s journey will be informed by the outcomes. We respond to the dynamic flow of the needs of the group.
And together, we rise.
[*1: An interesting, yet highly invalid aside here, is that group A consists of three boys all of whom have free and regular access to video games. Group B has no access to video games. Whether or not this has any relevance or bearing on the events of the afternoon cannot be determined here, yet it is nonetheless interesting to note.]
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