A Game to end Female Mutilation

Dear Major FUN,

I work for an international non-profit that works on women's and children's health issues. We have a small grant to develop an educational board game designed for African youth to use as part of a school curriculum called Family Life Education. The goal of the game would be to get them to talk about bodies, and/or meanings of traditions. The bigger goal behind that is to end female genital mutilation or female circumcision.

How's that for a tall order? Anyway, I was wondering if you could recommend any materials or web-sites or whatever related to board game design, or suggest any toy companies that might supplement our grant, or be interested in our project. Or any artists? As you can see, I am starting with basically no info, so any insights from you would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Sincerely,

Ann Hendrix Jenkins

Dear Ann Hendrix Jenkins,

A game to end female genital mutilation. Obviously, I'd have to understand a lot more about the politics and complexities of this issue in order to approach it through play, but I don't need to know any more in order to share your concern. I figure since this is going out to the vasty Major FUN E-list, maybe I can just start the ball rolling.

OK. So here's the ball, and I'm rolling:

I imagine myself in a neighborhood where female mutilation is the only game in town.

I really want to play with these people. As long as I'm in the neighborhood. But, nope, I really don't like their game. I don't want to play it. And I don't want them to play it, either.

So I make my own game. A glaringly different game. A game about female celebration. Female genital celebration. Like Georgia O'Keefe, I paint a game of flowers and flowering, of seasons and unfolding. A game tied in to time and growth and the inherent perfection of the natural form.

A deck of cards, each suit a season, each card another phase of the natural, untouched evolution of the female form.

Obviously, I'm going to have to start out with some kind of solitaire, at least until I get somebody to join me.

There's a game called GAPS. You lay out all the cards face-up, in four rows. Since they've been so well shuffled, the object of the game is just about self-evident, which is exactly the kind of game we're looking for, just about self-explanatory.

You remove the aces. This gives you 4 blank spaces, or gaps. To move a card into a gap, it must be one higher and of the same season (suit) as the card before it, or one lower and of the same season as the card after it. Moving a card, you reveal another gap. And so on and so on, until the whole deck organized, suit by suit, each in its proper order.

You get three deals. The cards that aren't in order get picked up, shuffled, the aces shuffled back in. Then, starting from where you left off, you deal out the cards, remove the aces, and continue where you left off.

So I start playing Gaps with my special female celebration deck, and wait for help. Sooner or later someone will get curious enough, and will want to kibitz. And then we can play Gaps together. And then, when the game is over, and we can look together at all those beautifully feminine images, in their natural order, all of us on the same side, and then maybe we'll talk.

My recommendations must therefore be:

1. It doesn't have to be a board game.

2. It should celebrate the natural beauty of the female, spirit and body.

3. It should be a cooperative game, a puzzle that people solve together.

Because in the bigger game where people mutilate each other in order to play, the sides are too clearly drawn for us to compete safely or joyfully. The violation too profound. For us to win, they have to change their game. For us to win, they have to quit.

The bigger game of ending female genital mutilation is ultimately a game of defection. And until they can safely defect, the best game we can make for them may be one that they can play in secret, by themselves, together.

Yours in the game,

Major Fun

Subj: Re: A Game to End Female Circumcision
Date: 96-05-27 23:45:00 EDT
From: Ian Browde
To: Major Fun

CC: ajenkin@path-dc.org

Congrats: for taking on an issue of this significance in such an enlightened, in my view, way.

My contribution follows, please accept it in a convergent, supportive spirit:

GAME IDEAS

1) A card game to which I was introduced many years ago called Strat-O-Gin was invented to help medical students learn medicine. The idea was scenario building with cards until a coherent scenario of 3 - 5 cards was accumulated. That person then got to read out their solution/diagnosis. This can be fun, competitive and educational.

2) It would be easy to design a variation which included a board.

(Africans- mainly urban people, might be orientated to both board games and card games so a choice or blend might suggest themselves)

3) Developing an electronic basis for the game might serve to increase the paying market, it is a very topical topic in some circles in the USA), and enable a much wider, aware of the whole picture, distribution in Africa.

4) Distribution alliances could be forged in both for-, and not-for-profit circles.

"One thing we are really trying to get at here is helping the young people exercise critical thinking about traditions and their meanings. Just as all cultures promote the continuation of tradition for its own sake, that is often what happens with FGM. There are often many reasons given as to why FGM must happen as well, eg if not circumcised female genitals will grow like a tree, for hygenic reasons, to control female sexuality.

People often think they are doing the right thing in having a girl circumcised, because otherwise she will never be able to marry, will not fit in, will be repulsive, will have health problems etc."