Camp SKY has come and gone which is totally insane considering it was a year-long project-in-planning. It was so jam-packed I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do it justice in words or photos, but here’s my best shot. Madam Elisa (Elisabeth), our wonderful camp director, showed up at the Kasungu Teacher’s Training College on August 11th to start setting up followed by PCVs who started trickling in day-by-day to lay the groundwork. I arrived on August 15th but immediately left again for Lilongwe to withdraw an absurd amount of kwacha from the bank (one of our biggest grants was deposited directly into my personal account so according to my bank statement, I was a BWANA for a couple of weeks). On Tuesday, August 17th, kids from the far reaches of the country left their villages to make their way to camp, and by the late-night hours, we were 68 campers and 8 junior counselors strong. Everyone woke up bright and early Wednesday morning (and by woke I mean it’s unclear if the campers, at least the girls in my dorm, slept AT ALL, which was a trend for the ENTIRETY of camp..) to start our daily weekday schedule: breakfast at 6:30, academic classes from 7:30-1:00, lunch, extracurricular activities/sports/AIDS education from 2:30-5:30, dinner, evening activities, lights out (HA, right). The kids had access to all sorts of stuff they don’t see too much at Community Day Secondary Schools: laboratories, computers, and classes in study skills, starting small businesses, sewing, cooking, solar engineering, sustainable agriculture, and so on. Also, my group is awesomely energetic, so the campers also got to witness/be a part of many a DANCE PARTY throughout our 10-day camp. We rocked that intense schedule Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, then took a break for the weekend. Saturday we took a hike up Kasungu mountain (er, “nature walk” – Malawians don’t really do exercise for the sake of exercise, or fun, so we thought our campers would respond better to “nature walk” than “let’s hike up this big hill!”). The best part about the distinction I just explained is that right now it’s dry season, and everything is dead, and Malawians are burning off the brush in preparation for planting, so the night before we hiked Kasungu.. they burned EVERYTHING on it. Seriously. Ryba and I had to go into Lilongwe on Friday to pick up Camp SKY t-shirts and do some other errands, and when we got back to Kasungu that night, the whole mountain was on fire. Ideal. Anyway, much as the kids complained going up, I think they really enjoyed it, and it was a huge accomplishment for all of them to make it to the top. That afternoon we went back to the college and the kids alternated between two activities: beehive construction and goat dissection. Awesome pictures of the latter to follow. Finally, we had Nditha (“I can!”) Sports, which are a part of the Hope Kit HIV/AIDS training portion of our program, and which eventually devolved into soccer (er, football) and ultimate frisbee, haha. Sunday was a bit of a down day, with time for church, cleaning, studying, etc., and Monday we jumped right back in to our busy weekday schedule! Tuesday we took the campers on a field trip to Lilongwe where we visited the new Parliament building and Kamuzu International Airport. Parliament is beautiful, though disconcertingly out of place on the Malawian landscape. Construction costs exceeded 20 million USD which is.. kind of an inconceivable amount of money over here. The kids had really intelligent, relevant questions to ask, and it was so clear why these cream-of-the-crop students had been chosen for this experience. Plus, many of them got to use flush toilets and urinals for the first time ever, which is equally epic in my opinion. We also had a session planned at the World Bank, but sadly, our contact was sick that day and so we had to nix it from the schedule. I think the kids enjoyed watching the airplanes more than they would have appreciated another info session, though. Wednesday and Thursday we returned to the normal program with a couple of fun additions: visits from a radio DJ and the Attorney General (and the first FEMALE Attorney General at that!). Wednesday night the campers put on a carnival where each group was responsible for running a booth, and Thursday we finished it all off with the annual Camp SKY DISCO! Friday morning (I was running on 32 minutes of sleep from the night before..), we loaded the kids in trucks and minibuses and sent them home to their villages where, hopefully, they will use and share all of the experiences that they had and enrich their communities via ripple effect. It was pretty amazing to see how camp – something that is such a normal part of an American childhood – was totally revolutionary for these secondary school students. It was overwhelming and exhausting, but incredibly fun, and honestly, one of the things that I feel the best about doing during my year here. I think it’s really rewarding for all of the first-year (now second-year, AH) volunteers to have that experience under our collective belt as we head into year two.
Phew! There are a lot of words up there, but so far, no pictures! So now I’ll rectify that.. Pictures do so much to illustrate the fun and ridiculous side of life =) But I’ll start with some “business.” Here we are, Camp Sky 2010!
And these are my students, Madalitso (“Blessings” in Chichewa) and Alex:
Who’s excited for camp?!
Aaand who doesn’t know what’s going on?!
Aaand… who’s scared of that big monster to our left?!
Not Ryba, apparently.
Apparently, at some point in the last year, all of my friends became teachers..
And so did I:
How did THAT happen?! Sadly, as you can see, I haven’t grown, though.
Also, even though we are all ostensibly teachers, that doesn’t keep us from doing things like writing THE GAME on the board and leaving it for the teacher to follow to lose the game. Well played, Russ. Well played. My favorite part is that he didn’t even attempt to explain it to our kids, haha! Just wrote it up there for me and moved on to math..
The English teachers decided to work on root words during SKY. The MSCE asks students to define words in a very SAT-like style but with the added twist that, oh yeah, this is these kids’ SECOND LANGUAGE. Roots, prefixes, and suffixes can go a long way in helping students guess at words they may not recognize, but the concept is of a higher-level than most students can grasp at our schools. SKY was a great place to disseminate this information to the kids that can really use it as each volunteer selected their top boy and girl to attend. Toward the end of camp, though, I decided to do a fun activity recommended by Madam Watkins: concrete poems, or poems that are written in the shape of the thing they are describing. Below is one of my favorites:
Jordan does a good job of linking the business with the ridiculous:
As promised, here are the awesomely disgusting goat dissection photos.
Wow.
WOW.
PCVs take their job so seriously:
I believe Will’s response to this photo was “Oh my gosh, Peace Corps Volunteers have no souls”:
Bit by bit, the goat was broken down into pieces. Here we have Mr. Harris with the lungs:
Madam Kelly with the heart:
Madam Jenn with the digestive system (and a whole lot of flies, poor girl):
Madam Esther with the leg (muscles, tendons, etc.):
And Mr. Ryba with the head/brain:
Here are some environment volunteers who came to teach the kids about mud oven construction:
An awesome staged Nditha Sports shot by Bearded Ben:
And the Attorney General doing a little Q & A with our kids:
To get the students to Kasungu Mountain, we hired a truck and piled them all in the back in true Malawian style. It was an awesomely bad idea. And the kids loved it:
Publicity shot!
Here are the campers starting their nature walk with a trek through the fields:
Publicity shot v.2!
The ants go marching two-by-two hurrah:
See, they look like they’re having fun, right?
Ben.. maybe not so much. But who has fun hiking in FLIP FLOPS?!
WE MADE IT!
Jenn’s legs were shaking so bad on the way down, you would’ve thought she was dancing. I did my best to brace her =) Still she was pretty pissed at me for being short enough to reach down and grab rocks to help me on the way down. Shortness has to have SOME advantages, sheesh.
Jordan is coming for you. Always.
But we out-gangsta him with our huge glasses:
Speaking of beating J-Train, I think it’s pretty clear who was winning in this problem-solving dance party:
Oh yeah, teachers getting down in the staff room:
But I’m straying from the business.. Here we are on our way to Lilongwe!
Parliament on field trip day:
Can you believe this exists in Malawi?!
..and now I must go back to ridiculous again. The window on the bus next to Ban and Harris was missing on our trip to Lilongwe. Also, as I’ve mentioned before, the two of them are embroiled in a non-hair-cutting battle. Witness the windswept glory:
Jordan K. Harris: Embodiment of the proverb “the sun never sets on cool”:
Speaking of bus rides, Ryba and I had an epic time trying to get back from Lilongwe after picking up SKY shirts. I don’t even remember how many times we were transferred between vehicles at this point, but eventually we ended up standing in the aisle of this coaster of darkness:
We shared an iPod and pretended it wasn’t happening. And Ryba got to laugh at me and the fact that when I held onto the bar running across the ceiling.. my feet didn’t touch the floor.
And speaking of darkness.. here is Will bludgeoning a bat to death with the handle of a Malawian hoe! Yep.
Moving on.. during activity block, Jordan decided to offer slack lining as an option. I was prepared to witness some epic face-planting on this day. Luckily, no one got seriously hurt, but there were some pretty amazing falls. And the campers LOVED it. Here are a few shots:
Part of the problem: Jordan decided to turn the activity into a competition, and reward the kid who got the farthest on the line. As a result, even as kids were falling, they’d leave their feet on the line and NOSE-DIVE in a last ditch attempt to stay on.
Oh man.. let’s see, what else.. As always, there were some pretty epic sunsets:
Jordan claims he’s going to hire me to follow him around and take pictures of him with the sunset behind him. I’ll take that job.
Will and I tried to take our recurring gansta photo, but I kept thinking about how ridiculous his hair is and I just couldn’t hold it together for the shot:
There was some ridiculous man-love happening between Jordan and Will (again, as always). Here they are, fighting like a pair of 2nd grade girls:
So beautiful. SKY was the birth of an official name for the long-existing Will-Ash-Jordan Trio. Henceforth, our clan shall be known as WAJ. Now a series of WAJ love, starting with the shot that I believe all three of us have as our current facebook photo:
After this picture, we decided we needed to have a WAJ photoshoot. Of course, one of the goals of this event was to make me look as ridiculous as possible, so Jordan decided the inaugural picture needed to be us hanging from a goal post. A goal post that, of course, I couldn’t reach.. as you can see:
The aftermath smack talk:
..ahem. Eventually, Jordan got on all fours, and I crawled up. The end result is this beauty:
Aaaaaand.. the dismount:
We took a few more jumping shots, and I was CONVINCED that I was going to get my feet off the ground. The result?...
I may or may not have fallen as a consequence of this..exploit.., but you can’t deny that I got AIR.
This one is also pretty epic:
Sound as photo was being taken? :::CRACK::: Also, if you zoom in, there’s an iwe jumping in the background! HAHAH.
Post-SKY, WAJ was wiped.. so we had a nice little WAJ nap:
I big-spooned Jordan, and he insisted I get my knees all the way in. And thus.. I reach mid-back:
I did my best.
Backing up, carnival night, a requirement of which was ridiculous garb. PCVs definitely succeeded. I’m not sure who is most incriminated by this photo, but it’s not me, so I’m posting it:
Amazing. Quail men at the puzzle booth:
Mr. D and face painting:
“Hey Kris, can you take a picture of us?”
Thanks.
Better?
Will’s kid pulled out all the stops, too, with this terrifying mask:
I’m traumatized. Though equally as much by Will’s belly shirt, so you know, I guess that’s how they rock out in Khwawa (Will’s village).
Finally, the disco. Safe to say Jordan leveled the dance-off playing field:
Wait, is that what I think it is? Oh yes, here it comes..
..the WORM.
Ban got his groove on with the kids:
My kid, Alex, got DOWN. Look at him! (Laker’s jersey – kid knows where his PCV comes from, say WHAT?!)
YEAH, BOY! Brush those shoulders off! AND he was getting the LADIES!
HAHAH incredible.
Phew, anyway.. like I said, after that, we packed up the kids, then packed up our stuff, and bounced. During the packing we found a Twister board which afforded us some delirious fun as we waited for a minibus:
And then we went to Lilongwe, napped, showered, ate a delicious family-style dinner prepared by Esther, and either rocked out on the town or crashed hard. Jesi didn’t quite make it to Lilongwe before passing out:
And I, apparently, fell asleep like this:
Until, that is, Jordan woke me up to go dancing, and you better believe I rallied!
So there you have it, CAMPACAMPACAMP SKY (the campers sang the whole “Everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them, we are the campers” ditty, but when they got to the next line, it sounded like “CAMPACAMPACAMP SKY” even though we later realized it was actually “campers of the Camp SKY”). Honestly.. I miss it. I love it when my group is together, we have such a freaking good time. Not to mention, SKY was such an amazing experience and accomplishment. But alas, now were all scattered to the winds and year two is underway. And thus far… let’s just say it’s been less than stellar. But to end on a good note, something to look forward to for my next blog – here is the first picture of my mom’s visit:
Oh yes.. my mom.. got WAJed.
Oh! And because I don’t want to get too far behind on current life as I write about the big things from weeks past, as of September 27th, my group, education 2009, has been living in Malawi for ONE YEAR! The far north four (Yeager, Will, Meg, and myself) got together at my site to celebrate. Mr. Nyasulu came out with us, and witnessed a beer-chugging competition FAILURE on my part. I don’t know why I thought I could beat Ban, a former varsity swimmer. This was like part of his every day routine throughout school. But anyway, I leave you with a shot of the northerners, all smiles as we pass this milestone. Congrats to all my ed09 buddies =)
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