On the June 26th Folk U Friday: there was music, another Cortes resident gave gardening tips and Manda Aufochs Gillespie’s feature interview gave listeners a glimpse into one of the oldest traditional medicine from the East. Muneera Wallace is an Ayurveda practitioner.
I first started taking my children to Guatemala when they were just one and five. It was an idea born on Cortes where two of my friends announced they were going to spend three or four months with their adopted son, so he’d have a chance to get better acquainted with this part of his heritage. Two of the first friends I met after moving to Canada had themselves just moved there to start a Children’s Village and I was excited to visit them. So, suddenly, I was moving to Guatemala for fourth months without my husband and without knowing enough Spanish to do more than order “Uno taco por favor.”
On today’s Folk University Talk Show, Registered Therapeutic Counsellor, Hayley Newell shares with us a deeper scientific and practical understanding of play. By definition play serves no practical purpose. Yet, it is anything but valueless. It lays the foundation of a child’s cognitive development, contributes to their physical health, services an opportunity to work through traumatic experiences and develop emotional resources, and helps kids practice healthy social interactions. The brain doesn’t know the different between real and imagined experiences so play can set the foundation for a great deal of future development.
Karen defines hope as: “the refusal to give up on love.” This idea inspired an essay I wrote called The Alchemy of Hope (https://mandagillespie.com/hope/)