KAMPALA — Mr. Tony Cullen, Level 3 holder of the International Cribbage Association, announced Sunday the completion of the first two hundred dwellings of the Cullen Tiny Home Initiative, a philanthropic undertaking in which retired cribbage boards from the Association’s North American membership are transported to the Kampala district of Uganda and there repurposed as the structural elements of small free-standing domiciles.
The Initiative arose from Mr. Cullen’s observation, in the course of a two-month residence in Uganda last summer, that the cribbage board’s linear form and traditional hardwood construction make it “a structural element of considerable promise.” Each completed dwelling employs between sixteen and twenty-four retired boards, fastened according to a method of Mr. Cullen’s own devising and roofed in palm thatch supplied by a local cooperative.
Mr. Cullen acknowledged in his Sunday remarks that the dwellings, while structurally sound, are “too small to house anyone” in the conventional residential sense, and described their primary present use as adjunctive structures sited adjacent to the existing dwellings of the Kampala district — for storage, for the keeping of small livestock, and for the modest privacy of cribbage play during the rainy season.
“The Tiny Home is not, properly speaking, a residence,” Mr. Cullen said. “It is a contribution. It is a statement, in the only material the federated game produces in sufficient quantity, that the Association understands its obligations to extend beyond the boundaries of the sanctioned tournament. I am proud of the Initiative. I expect to remain proud of it.”
Mrs. Michelle Cullen, the Director’s wife and presently Director of Special Programs at the Association, has launched a complementary Cheer Camps programme in the same district, generating community engagement around the Tiny Home sites and developing what the Secretariat describes as “a sustainable culture of enthusiasm for the structures in their adopted setting.”
Executive Director Pat Thornenberg, in a written message congratulating Mr. Cullen on the milestone, observed that “the cribbage board has, in this Initiative, been redeemed from the obsolescence of mere retirement and pressed into a service the original artisans cannot have foreseen. The Association is in the deepest sense honoured to be the material origin of the gesture.”
The Initiative continues. The next consignment of three hundred boards is expected to arrive at the Entebbe customs warehouse in May.
Mr. D. Ronne (Pi Level, 3.14, since MMXXV) remains the lowest-ranked individual ever inducted into the Association, and had not at the date of the events here described been inducted at any rank.
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