Summer Camp… Finally*

It’s been almost a month now since camp ended, but I really want to write about it so please accept my tardiness.

For this installment of the Kedougou Leadership Summer Camp in Dindefello (my first, the thrid in total) everything got bigger. More students, more Senegalese staff, more food… more arguments… one of which was was over the fact that there was less bread than last year. Peace Corps volunteers were not as numerous as in the past and tried to take a back seat as much as possible to allow the Senegalese counterparts to take as much control of the camp as possible. It’s all part of the plan to make this be run completely by the ADDK (Association pour le Développement Durable a Kédougou/Association for the Sustainable Development of Kedougou). They could still use some help with ‘the softer side of camp,’ speaking of which, anyone know of a French version of that “Camp is for the Camper” book?

Peace Corps volunteers took on specific programmatic duties. I was in charge of the Challenge Course, Kellen took care of Sports, Eric had First Aid, Hannah was SeneGAD/AIDS, and Meera did Art and translated for me at the Challenge Course. Then there was Thomas, who planned out and ran the camp while it was happening, he also wound up paying for the camp when funds ran out with the last of his CFA before he returned to America (we plan on doing a little more budget training next year). Basically, camp would not have happened without him. The Senegalese counselors this year were working towards what basically amounts to becoming a licensed counselor. As such there were rules that kept us from being able to work with specific counselors and train them on specific areas of camp as well.

Challenge Course – Step 1: find new challenges for second and third year campers. I thought I had that taken care of based on the resources I saw from last year’s camp. I was wrong, they had all done everything I planned and prepared for. Now I’m working on grouping challenges so that there is something new to be done each year as well as the good repeats of things that are always different. Step 2: introduce challenge to campers. Simple… except their first languages are Puular OR Malinké, not both, luckily by middle school everyone can speak French which is what we tried to run the camp in as much as possible. My French, however, is limited to being a customer or responding to yes or no type questions. I can understand quite a bit of what I hear, I just have a lot of trouble producing French on my own. This is why I stole Meera (who has never done a Challenge Course) as my translator, we like to think of it as a Little Mermaid type situation. Step 3: TCCCT. This is where Meera came in even handier and the Little Mermaid of the situation really came out. The discussion after a challenge is completed, or not completed, is really the point of doing a Challenge Course. That’s where everyone learns to work as a team and all the joys I get out of doing a Challenge Course become obvious. Pretty quickly the campers figured out that we were looking for certain key words – Trust, Communication, Cooperation, and Creating Thinking (TCCCT). Once they figured them out they would just say them in the discussion times. This is where it’s good to have some experience with it, you need to ask the right questions at the right times to lead the discussion in the right direction, and to know when to back down if the group is starting to get frustrated. I by no means am an expert, but I have had experience. By the end of the two weeks I loved seeing not only the campers getting what we were talking about, but also the way Meera wound up being able to just run with the discussion on her own. This is why I do what I do.

Here’s how it worked, towards the end of the challenge I would give Meera (in English) a few questions to ask and points I thought they should get out of the discussion. She would start the discussion with all that in mind and I would just listen to what the campers were saying, most of which I was able to understand or at least get the gist of. If there was something I wanted to ask, or a point I thought they should discuss more I would just say it when I normally would, in English, to Meera, who would then say it in French. I imagine this was confusing for anyone watching since I wasn’t having anyone translate to me, but still able to guide the discussion. It’s also a matter of being able to keep the right pacing of the discussion otherwise you loose momentum fast and Meera was really helpful for that. My French comes out a lot slower – at one point when I was guiding a sub-group of campers on my own I blanked on the word for hand. After a long pause I held up my own hand, started at it, and said, “Ça c’est quoi?” (What is this?). I don’t imagine I had much credibility on my own after that.

Creative Thinking proved to be the most challenging concept for the campers throughout camp. It makes sense since (haha) in many cases it was literally beaten out of them in school. The Senegalese school system is heaving on the memorization of things, in order to be successful in school you need to know things verbatim. In this case creative thinking is almost a disadvantage. It was really interesting to see how readily the second and third years got into it and to compare that to how much the first years struggled when we did not provide a single correct answer. Again, at the end of the two weeks the change was apparent in all of the campers.

Aside: Dear Campy Friends, I have a challenge for you over the next year. I need activities that encourage/teach Sportsmanship. Tons of cheating along with sore losers and winners. We stopped things quite often to explain that it is a whole lot more fun for everyone if you follow the rules, and in the case of the challenge course when you start cheating you lose the whole point of doing it. It’s the challenges that you build off of and learn from. I’m talking really basic stuff here; the concept of sportsmanship just really isn’t there. GO! Bonus points if it’s in French and English.

So a quick wrap up on camp as a whole. I would say this year was filled with growing pains, next year it should have settled into it’s new scale and run a lot smoother. Plus, with all the certified counselors we won’t have to have the outside influence that wound up instigating a lot of the tension. The wonderful bureaucracy of it all should be simplified (see flowchart pictured here).

Unfortunately I have to end on a low note. About two weeks after camp ended, leadership camp, one of the male counselors and a couple of his friends took a moto ride out to a village. There they went to the house of one of the female campers so he could ask her parents for her hand in marriage. Reminder, these are middle school students. Also keep in mind that this isn’t as a whole culturally unacceptable; the younger generations and the more educated seem to prefer waiting until the girl is out of school until she gets married off.

Just to twist that knife in there a little more it is worth noting that this particular counselor is also a teacher. Meaning he works with kids this age all the time, and once she pops out a kid he’s allowed to take a second wife. Now, the parents do need to approve in order for this to happen. We need to be honest here; she’s a village girl being proposed to by a teacher from the city. This is a huge get for the family, not only does she get out of the village and into the city, but she also has a husband with a steady job. It’s unlikely that they will deny this union. Come to leadership camp… expand your horizons, open yourself up to new possibilities… yeah.