Here’s the spiel.
About a month and a half ago I found myself needing to move into Kédougou full time to help make sure this camp would be a success. I had been doing a lot of running around and coming back and fourth from site to take care of things last minute or do some damage control. I was stressing out far to much and feeling guilty about not being at site enough (site guilt) so I made the call to headquarters to get permission to turn my focus on the huge project that is camp. They said it was okay and I had successfully gotten rid of the stress of getting the panicked “do it now” phone calls because I’ve been at site. I have every confidence that it was a very worthwhile move.
Once in Kédougou full time I was able to work on my computer to get everything organized thanks to having a relatively steady power source. The house also had wireless internet, emails with attachments are glorious… that is until the router gets struck by lightning. All of the house electronics are dead now thanks to rainy season storms, I think they are actually going to pay to get the electric in the house grounded properly now that EVERYTHING got fried. I digress (surprise?)
What was all that time in the big village spent doing? One thing I tried really had to do was get some kind of lesson plans put together for the different activities we would be doing then getting minions to translate them to French. I’m not going to lie, I didn’t do all that much work putting together the actual plans, just coordinated their creation then collected them onto my computer. My end goal here is to put together two binders, one in French and one in English so that we can be on the same page with the Senegalese group we work with to put on the camp (The Association for the Sustainable Development of Kédougou or ADDK). I was explaining this plan to one of the counselors during the camp and he got all excited and said that he’d send me information on the activities they do so I can just have everything in one place. I hope he follows through with that, Magic Painting is pretty awesome but I really want those songs written down. There were also countless planning meetings, discussions about what to do with our lacking funds, contacting all the applicants we accepted (we wound up with 76 campers and contacted a lot more people for confirmation. I wound up working with Baba Touré a lot in the weeks leading up to camp. He’s a great kid, he had been a camper the past 3 years and stepped up to play a pretty major role in the planning of camp this year. In fact he invited me over to his place for Korité, the big holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. I wanted to go back to Khossanto to spend the holiday with my host family, but that would have meant not being around for the few days leading up to camp, not really an option. Very glad I decided to head to his house during the day, it was great to be surrounded by Malinké again instead of Pulaar, the majority in Kédougou, or French which I’m still not horribly comfortable in.
A few days after Korité the students started showing up from all over the region and staying with family or friends in Kédougou. This is when it all started to get real for me… summer camp is actually going to happen! We were all pretty much set, except one big problem, we never really finished the schedule. I had Peace Corps’ activities scheduled for some time, but I’d been trying to meet with the ADDK guy in charge of programming for days but our schedules never lined up. So the night before everyone got on the bus to Dindefello I stayed up and quick filled in the blanks with items from the random list of activities I was told ADDK could do. This wound up not getting set until the second day of camp, and thanks to not having the foresight and buying their materials ahead of time the first day of camp had to get changed around a lot. Peace Corps volunteers were the only ones prepared for their activities the morning of the first day, so the group of 9 volunteers helping out at the start of camp were kind of put through the ringer right off the bat. Once the schedule was finished and approved things settled down a lot, but you have to appreciate the flexibility of everyone involved. 
Backtracking a bit, I mentioned there was a bus ride to take everyone from Kédougou to the campement in Dindefello where we were having the camp. Thankfully after last rainy season the laterite road to Dindefello was regraded, meaning the parts of the road that last year were absolutely terrifying to watch cars of kids go over were now just really bad sections. However, most of the kids and volunteers were loaded into an old charter bus. Being on the bus with all those excited campers singing songs I recognized from last year was amazing, you could literally feel their energy. In my opinion it was the perfect way to drop all the other volunteers into the camp spirit, if not force it on them. We almost made it, and then in a pretty good-looking section of road we got stuck. What happened is that when the put the new laterite down they didn’t really do anything to what was under it, and in this particular place in the road what was under it amounted to pudding. It was just waiting for something heavy enough to come along and hit it in just the right place and we were that lucky. Everyone sat and waited for a while, the girls were released first, after about an hour, to hike the remaining couple kilometers to Dindefello. The boys were kept behind to help with the excavation to get the bus out. After another couple hours all hope was lost and the boys were sent to hike those last couple K as well. All baggage was left behind and we contacted another car to pick that up and bring it to us later that day - an auspicious start to camp. 
During camp we had the Challenge Course run by Patrick this year (I did it last year) and it was the same situation were he needed a translator to help him with the French, which most of the time was Little Jess. Patrick has had a lot of experience running camp and did an amazing job, unluckily for him though challenge course was scheduled for nearly every activity period. Art was headed up by our resident artist Sully, he did camp two years ago but had to miss it last year, thanks to his hard work the kids were ready to go when it came to creative thinking. Plus we had some beautiful artwork hung all around the campement, just heartwarming. LaRocha saved the day with neem lotion and nutritional porridges for the first and second year campers respectively. Their wares were then sold at the weekly market thanks to marketing lessons from Tatiana and Little Jess. First aid sessions were once again run by Eric who seemed to have a lot better luck getting his message across – tourniquets are not the first thing to do when someone is bleeding. Rachel, Meaghan, and Big Jess did a bunch of work with gardening and tree nurseries with our favorite Trees For the Future guy Karumba. Mike and Frank were the sports masters, who knew ultimate Frisbee would go over so well and that they’d get the rules so quickly? Ian took the Creative Writing lesson plan Hannah wrote up and did a great job on that with limited materials. Spanish tourists were in and out of Dindefello throughout the camp to see the waterfall, one group in particular sat and listened to a bunch of their creative writings and were a great audience for them. I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone or something – a highlight of the second week, for me anyway, was the Sexual Health talks Meera led – I never got a chance to sit in on a full one and did want to do too much popping in and out because of the sensitive nature of the topic but I heard great things and the kids got a lot out of it, including ONE wristbands which were in high demand. I’ve listed certain people doing certain activities but it should be known that everyone kind of did everything (teamwork makes the dream work). 
ADDK’s counselors lead a bunch of activities as well as all kinds of song and dances. The last day of camp wrapped up with the Olympics, all of camp broke up into 4 groups and the games began. ADDK took care of all of the planning and running of that so it was nice for me and the other volunteers still around to get the day to kind of relax, be with the campers, and act as crowd control. With that camp was done, we held an awkward middle school dance party at the campement, people were lifted into the air, I was gifted a new shirt that my head can barely fit through, everyone was happy, girls cried to be leaving their new friends, and no cars got stuck. It’s kind of hard to believe it’s all over.
PPS: Here's a link to one of the ADDK Counselor's blog. He has a few posts about camp with some videos, lots of pictures, but words are in French. Kédougou Avenir
Seamus says "Thanks DAVID! I miss you!" But when can I play with Adam next :)
ReplyDeleteWith camp, the adventure often starts before and ends after you'd ever expect it.
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