another excerpt: sand games

The following are excerpts from my journal about the sand games I watched, learned, and played over the course of a day or two. I'm hoping it'll add a dynamic flavor to the proceedings.

"Now Abu Laith's demonstrating some sort of Go/Chinese checkers type game for the kids. It's a routine where stones are organized in a plus, and jumping over one removes it, so you're left with four. (Ok, so let's be honest, they're really old goat-poop.) He's doing a different one now. It's unclear what sort of game (competitive, etc) it will evolve into, because now he's really just trying to teach Haneen the rules."

"Now Laith and Haneen are playing the game by themselves."

"Abu Laith just taught me the games. The first one he showed them was "Seeja". It's a sort of solitaire, a puzzle with one answer. There are twelve stones organized in a plus, with one empty space in the middle. The goal is to hop-take them until there is one left in each end of the plus. I took to it quickly and seemed to impress them. The other game is "Gitaar", and it's sort of a dynamic tic-tac-toe. The board is a quartered square, and each person has three pieces which reside on the vertices and move along the line segments. Players pick starting spaces, then maneuver until they have three in a row. Haneen gave me advice that would have benefited her faither, much to everyone's amusement. Now he's showing Laith "Seeja"."

"The next day I played Gitaar with Haneen, which was interesting because she couldn't remember the rules, so I just moved randomly and occasionally succumbed to beating her. Um Laith and I had to keep correcting her...frequently the only legal move was the last one she tried, so I wonder whether she was just messing with us. Chased Laith around the desert, and then Haneen, too, which got tiring. Laith would run and then dive right when I was about to catch him. Haneen was faster, so fewer breaks. Running barefoot on clean open sand is kindof fabulous. We also took pictures. Um Laith and I can't talk much, but I think she likes me because I play wit her kids. I went for a walk, which was nice."