Jenga is game of hand-eye coordination skill played with 54 wooden blocks. Players take turns removing one block at a time from a tower constructed of all 54 blocks. Each block removed is then placed on top of the tower, creating a progressively taller and more unstable structure. The game ends when any part of the tower collapses because of either the removal of a block or its new placement on top of the tower. The last player to complete a turn before the tower collapses is the winner.
I was playing Jenga this morning with one of the refugee kids at the Ocalenie Foundation safe space for children in the Ukrainian Refugee Reception Point / Humanitarian Aid Center in Przemyśl, Poland. Another group of kids was playing a wild game of catch-ball right next to where we were playing Jenga. I kept ducking and cringing as the catch-ballers leapt giddily back and forth around us and the beach ball they were playing with ricocheted wildly off of the walls and floor. I felt like we — and our Jenga tower — were about as exposed to an arial strike as a caravan of Ukrainian civilians fleeing to get out from under the Russian “rain of terror” in March of 2022. But my young Jenga adversary seemed quite unconcerned about the arial “beachball barrage” we were experiencing.
There are lots of notices and signs posted all around the refugee reception center. Most of them are in Polish or Ukrainian, so I don’t really know what they say, but there is one set of signs that is in in English, and it says “No Balloons.” There is also a picture of an inflatable rubber balloon — the kind used for party favors and decorations at kids birthday parties — with a red “X” across it. I don’t know under whose auspices these signs are hung, but evidently some group of good souls is afraid that the sound of an accidentally bursting balloon might trigger PTSD reactions in some shell-shocked refugees. I can imagine, if the same kind souls had seen us this morning, they would also be advocating to ban beach balls and Jenga blocks from the the children’s safe space. Sad as it is to think about young kids traumatized to the point of suffering PTSD, I am glad to report, to my layman’s eye, none of the kids we have entertained in the children’s safe space has seemed to be at all shell-shocked or unnerved by the ravages of war. The people we are hosting now seem to be getting out in time, and that’s a good kind of refugee crisis — hopefully a crisis with a happy ending for the refugees.