Camp 4

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At this camp I switched from English teacher to Librarian. I get enough teaching in my work site and wanted to try something different at camp. The librarian works a slightly different schedule from the other volunteers since I don’t work during class or club time. But I am on duty during all the breaks.

Out library is amazing and was stocked by the US Embassy in Rabat (THANK YOU!!!) with over 1,800 books of all levels. We have everything from simple picture books to Huckleberry Finn. We have three different kinds of dictionaries. And what the kids love most is we have lots of games.

The Embassy gave us four sets of Twister, eight American versions of Scrabble, two US National Parks versions of Monopoly, five Harry Potter Uno sets, and lots of other great games. We have a guitar and lots of dodge balls, Frisbees, baseball equipment and even a real NFL football: all brought by PCVs.

Since we had significantly fewer volunteers at this last session, besides the library I also got to help lead the GGLOW (Girls & Guys Leading Our World) club in the afternoons. Though morning English classes are fine with only one teacher, clubs really work best with two people. Marc did all the planning, since he had done GGLOW before and knew how it worked. I pretty much just did whatever he told me, since I didn’t know much of anything about GGLOW. It was fun and one of those typical Peace Corps skills transfer moments. I helped teach but also learned enough I think I could lead GGLOW activities on my own now.

This camp had very different demographics from the third session. There were less kids to begin with, only 70, which meant that the campers dorm rooms weren’t so overcrowded. Almost half were girls, which also made a big difference. It’s a lot easier to get girls to speak up in class when they aren’t completely outnumbered by the boys.

Another big difference was that over half of these kids were our “bled” kids. The bled is the countryside in Arabic and that’s where Peace Corps Volunteers live. Thanks to the US Embassy (once again) each Youth Development volunteer gets to pick three deserving students from their village to attend camp for free. All expenses, including travel to and from camp, are covered by the US Embassy. The criteria for our bled kids is that they be motivated students, able to be away from their family for two full weeks and not otherwise have the means to afford camp.

This creates an interesting mix of campers from small villages who are usually from extremely poor families, and campers from very rich families in Casablanca or Rabat. I have listened to a camper tell me about traveling around China and what his favorite restaurant in Shanghai is, and the next minute hear another camper say that her family is marrying her off next month so she won’t get to do her last year of high school this fall. There is quite a divide between the developed cities of Morocco and the undeveloped countryside. There is also somewhat of a divide between the Arab and Shullha (Berber) kids. Generally, the poorer bled kids are Shullha and the rich city kids are Arab, though of course there are plenty of exceptions.

With more bled kids and more Shullha at this last session, camp had a different feel. There was a lot more drumming and singing: the campers would break into song any time we had an unplanned moment of down time. Bus rides were especially fun and one of my highlights of this session was the bus ride to the beach at Sidi Bouzid. This town is really a rich little suburb of El Jadida and had a gorgeous beach, which is less populated and generally much cleaner than the beach right by camp in town. We never went anywhere without the drums and the clapping and singing inside the bus was deafening. I loved every minute of it and wished the ride had been longer. Part of my euphoria was realizing that I had heard some of the songs so many times that I could sing along to at least part of almost every one.

The all of a sudden it was the last night again and the kids were crying about how much they would miss each other in a big mob just outside the fishbowl. I had buckets of water balloons ready (thanks for sending those Mom!) and sneaked up on the roof with some other volunteers to put an end to the cry-fest. The sobbing quickly turned to screams of surprise and laughter when the kids realized they were being attacked. They cried all over again the next morning, but at least that night we managed to get them to bed laughing instead of crying.

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Photos

AIDS workshop
Just like the third session, we split the kids up and did activities about AIDS education. It was a huge success and we modeled our Environmental Day activities off the AIDS workhops, using the opportunity to train the Moroccan staff to lead the activities.

English class
As librarian I had free time during English classes, so I visited Meredith's class a few times to help out and learn from her teaching style. One great thing about working with so many other volunteers is that I got a lot of new ideas for my work in Kelaa.

Inside the Fishbowl
Free time was usually spent planning activities or hanging out with the kids, but sometimes we got to play with the games from the library. Of course, being in the fishbowl we were always on display for the campers. I was surprised how good some of them were at Scrabble in English, though Mark won most games anyway.

Pirates of the Atlas
Both camps 3 and 4 we showed the movie Pirates of the Caribbean as an evening activity. We all dressed up as pirates for dinner, saying Arrrr to anything the campers asked and generally getting them worked up for the movie.

Puzzles
We had one puzzle about Maryland donated by a PCV and Nadine (from NY, NY) always got the kids excited about it, though we only had that one puzzle and as soon as they completed it I would take it apart and make them do it all over again.

Ramparts
Oneo f our field trips was a walk to the historic Portuguese Quarter and a trip around the ramparts overlooking the harbor.

Spectacle
The last afternoon of camp is always the talent show, for which they use the French word 'spectac'. We got to use the big theater downtown and the campers went all out with their theater, comedy, music and dance skills.