What summer would be complete without attending summer camp?
My final week of my December Summer (remember, it is summer here in the
southern hemisphere) holidays found myself and the other YASC intern with HOPE
working a camp. One of our Co-Workers at HOPE is involved with a camp called
Goal Camp, which is a leadership interfaith camp. The camp’s aim is to promote
leadership qualities and dialog between 17-19 year olds who come from some sort
of troubled past. There is a heavy interfaith presence since the program this
was originally from was Face-to-Face, an international interfaith program based
out of the United States. Lacey and I were volunteered to help as facilitators
for the camp, and I have never enjoyed something I have been volunteered for as
much before.
I did not know what to expect from the camp. I had very
little information on what it was and how things were going to happen
beforehand since I was unable to attend any of the training or planning
meetings. The first day I met any of the other facilitators was the day before
camp was to start, at the final planning meeting. I did little more than sit
and observe at the meeting, partially because I did not know what I was doing
and partially because I had received some sad news that morning (but that is
another blog post). I did learn a few things at the meeting, like the fact that
the group of other facilitators seemed like a good group of people, the camps
program seemed to be interesting and well thought out, and that I was a part of
the “Get stuff done crew” as I came to call it. Myself, Adeeb (another facilitator),
Iggy, Sarah, and Rashaad (the three facilitators in charge) were not a part of
any dialog group. The dialog groups are what I would called small groups, or
conversation groups, basically it’s where the majority of the serious
conversation and sharing happens. Since we were not a part of these groups, our
responsibility would be to mostly make sure that everything else ran smoothly,
since if the other facilitators did not get their tasks for their events done
in time, we would have to finish up the set up. It was alright, though, because
being a part of this group allowed me to get a good look at all the background
activities that occur to get camps like this done, it allowed the most free
times of the facilitators, and it let me hang out with an awesome group of
people.
I could go in depth and describe everything that happened
during the week (Monday to Sunday), but I would end up writing a blog post
double, triple, or even quadruple the length of my others to get it done.
Instead, I will try to get the highlights. To start, I was co-cabin facilitator
with Izzy (not to be confused with Iggy). Izzy is an awesome guy who is
pursuing his undergrad in linguistics, Arabic, and Hebrew, with an honors in
Hebrew, and a diploma in education. He is also a hilarious guy with the most
infectious laugh and the capability to get very excited and expressive over the
smallest things, as well as being good at and enjoying very serious
intellectual conversations on a variety of important topics for no other reason
than he can and we should. Needless to say, I could not have asked for a better
co-cabin facilitator (we agreed to give our cabin the title “Cabin Kickass”,
something we were more excited about than the participants). There ended up
being 17 participants and 14 facilitators, so the ratio was very close to a 1-1
ratio. There were 3 guys’ cabins with 3 each in two cabin, and 2 in one. The 3
participants in our cabin were all awesome individuals. One of them felt more
comfortable speaking in Afrikaans than English, so the other people in the
cabin would take turns translating what he said for me during the cabin time in
the evening.
The activities varied from day to day. The ones I were
directly responsible for occurred later in the week, so for the first bit I
just helped out with whatever the other facilitators needed as well as planned
my events and electives. Ali and I were in charge of the sports elective. On
Tuesday it was scorching hot, so we ended up playing cricket, which the
participants enjoyed trying to explain the rules to me. The second day we
switched the elective around a little, since the day before the camp split
evenly down the genders with all the boys doing sports and all the girls doing
crafts. The second day we sold it more as games than sports, and ended up
attracting some of the girls over to our side. Ali introduced this awesome game
that was a combination of cricket, kickball, a little bit of red rover, and
just plain fun (he was good at that in general). The activities I was in charge
of planning and running were the gender night and the Amazing race obstacle
course.
Ruth and I were in charge of gender night, and it was one of
those things that went so much better than we could have ever hoped or planed
for (thought Ruth did most of the planning well before camp started). The
discussions and ideas being tossed out by the participants throughout the
evening were amazing, and it was one of my highlights of the week to see the wheels
start to turn and them begin to see where they had been taught faulty
perceptions and habits by society. They begin with writing five attributes
about themselves. They then split into gender groups to discuss and write down
attributes and characteristics they thought of for men and for women. This
alone sparked some debate and dialog, the female group quickly realized what
they were putting down was mostly stereotypes. Then we brought the groups back
together and had them view what the others had written both about their gender
group as well as the other. We then had them pair off into male and female
pairs, with one group of three (we really lucked out with the numbers being
almost even). We had them discuss everything and answer some questions we prepared,
then had them form larger groups of mixed gender, and had further discussion
there. The conversations in each part were so good and productive, that we let
each section have much more time than was intended for it. Ruth and I kept
checking between the groups and asking “Are you guys still going? Good, because
so are we. 5 more minutes?” We unapologetically stretched well past the time
allotted for the activity, but the higher-ups understood and were ok with it.
The amazing race was an activity planned almost solely by me
and held on Saturday. I was nervous how everyone would enjoy it, but it turned
out to be a huge success. There was the classic riddles to various stations
scavenger hunt. Then a ropes maze (which I ran and went super well). Only one group
figured out the trick. Everyone but one was blindfolded, and the one
unblindfolded person had to verbally “Get the rest of your team from point A to
point B”. We never said they had to go through the ropes. The trick was to just
walk them around the ropes. There was also a little zipline where they had a
competition to see who could get the furthest without touching the group. And
an impromptu station where there was a vertical grid of ropes and they had to
see how many people they could get from one side to the other without touching
the ropes (credit goes to Rashaad and Ali for the quick thinking to get that
one together so that the groups weren’t waiting on the zipline and ropes with
nothing to do). After that was Spin it to Win it, a relay race where each
member spun in a circle a number of times and then tried to do activities like
run straight, run and catch a frisbee, dance, etc. Then we had them build the
largest structure they could out of marshmallows and skewers. We ended it all
with a game of Jeopardy, where the categories where the themes of the various
days, and the questions came from events during those days. All in all it went
very well, and everyone seemed to like it.
Those were just two of the events from the entire week. I
could go on about the capture the flag game I helped put together that was a
huge success (Despite, or maybe because of, a few injuries). I could talk about
the Dance/fitness activity where we had outside instructors come in and pretty
much make us all realize how out of shape we were. I could wax poetic about the
exploratory trip to find the beautiful rock pools, and then the actual
excursion the camp took to visit them later in the week (with mixed results on
enjoyment).The talent show which had everyone rolling on the floor with
laughter at points, or snapping our fingers in recognition of some of the
realest slam poetry I have ever heard (usually the talent show is the part of
camp I enjoy the least and try my hardest to avoid, this one was actually
amazing). I could reminisce about the Help game, an activity that drove the
participants to the edge of frustration and annoyance with us. I could recount
Star Power, one of the hardest hitting events that had some participants in
tears and pure hatred directed toward the Facilitators in charge of it (the
group of five mentioned earlier). These and many other things could fill up a
multitude of more blog posts. Instead, I would like to talk a little about what
it made me realize about myself.
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