camp recap...a little late

Wow. It dawns on me that the summer is over, September is nearly upon us, and I have hardly written a thing….in fact, I think the last camp I managed to write about was the first one. My apologies. Here is the catch up blog (sorry if it is boring…you can always skip).

The second camp was held in Gavar at the local special school (A special school is a boarding school for kids with various disabilities. Interestingly enough, the school was in no way accessible…but that is a tangent for a different day). The staff was kind, helpful and grateful to have a camp in their city. The kids were very well behaved and arrived with a multitude of talents that were displayed throughout the week. One boy was a very accomplished singer and would randomly start singing opera or the national anthem and everyone would stop to listen. Another brought his tin whistle and literally led the other children around like the pied piper, a third decided mid-week to bring his dudook (a double-reed Armenian instrument) and he and the tin-whistle boy started doing duets. Then, a violin showed up. By the end of the week kids were dancing and singing and playing instruments as if this were music camp instead of ecology camp. Not that it matters a whole lot—the kids get a lot out of the lessons and leave with new ideas of how to respect and care for the environment, but more importantly they get a summer camp experience and new friends and adults who care for them and attention from foreigners. That makes a little go a long way.

The next camp was in Martini, where the kids were equally as well-behaved, if not better, although perhaps not quite as musically talented. They were pretty good at belting out the camp song: boom chicka boom…most likely familiar to American camp-goers out there. Every week as I watch these Armenian kids sing the same American camp song twice a day, and beg for it even at the end of the week, I think about American children of the same age, most of whom are way too cool for boom chicka boom. These camps are difficult, cumbersome things to organize, especially in another language and a culture not used to what we are doing. And yet the kids as a whole are so grateful, so well-behaved, so interested in what we have to say and what we are going to do next that the camps become easy….or at least that much more worthwhile.

Martuni was not easy. We earned our sense of satisfaction and every single movie-star moment at the end of the week. It was somewhat of a murphy’s law camp where if there was even the remotest possibility of it going wrong, it did. Some of this was due to miscommunication, some to people not doing their job or not showing up, some to people not taking things seriously, and some to just simple bad luck. I expect for things to go wrong, just not so many things and not all at once. I spent good deal of time actually yelling at people in Armenian who were trying to rip me off or wriggle out of some commitment or who were simply not doing their job and didn’t really seem to care. Unfortunately for me, my Armenian gets really bad when I get angry and I start using all the wrong tenses in all the wrong places. This does not help my case.

I was thinking I could enter this into my tutoring regimen. My tutor could give a topic to be angry about and I could practice yelling at her. Of course I would then have to hope for these annoyances to reoccur but the reality is that they probably will anyway. According to a neatly organized little graphic the Peace Corps handed out to us during training in our first or second month we are currently in a “negativity stage.” The actions of my colleagues and my feelings seem to corroborate this statement but I can’t help but wonder if there is more to it than just the fact that we have been here for a full year and are perhaps starting to get a little sick of it.

It has been an interesting month of what can perhaps be best described as getting too comfortable here and letting my guard down. A series of incidents (of the fairly non-threatening kind that can be mostly laughed about after the fact) have lead me to this realization, and also to the process of putting my guard back up…however one does that. I am still comfortable here, and happy in that fact, but in getting to know my community and learning the language and being known to many people where I live, I have perhaps forgotten that I look like an orange in a sea of apples. Now that tourist season is upon us, I look like any other unsuspecting foreigner, and unless the perpetrator is to strike up a conversation before, say, stealing my wallet, then he/she doesn’t know any difference. Not that said perpetrator would necessarily care if I were an unsuspecting peace corps volunteer instead of an unsuspecting tourist. Although, an unsuspecting tourist probably would have a bit more cash….

The last two camps went equally well, especially considering the level of burn out that was upon those of us who spent the whole summer in this rewarding yet exhausting pursuit. The good news is that the camps are now over!!!!! And were wildly successful in all senses of the word. We were fortunate enough to collaborate with the Birds of Armenia project in two of the camps and took the kids on bird watching excursions after experiencing an interactive bird identification course the day before. I have to say I was skeptical at first. I couldn’t imagine 40 5th and 6th graders getting into sitting quietly and watching birds for hours, but then again I was thinking about kids from the US. It works great in Armenia. The kids loved it and so did the adults. We saw water birds in Martuni and forest birds in Dilijan, and in both cases the kids were correctly identifying them by the end of the day.

Hrazdan and Dilijan (the last two camps) certainly were not immune to the bumps in the road of the other camps. In Hrazdan we had to kick out a boy on the first day after repeated bouts of not listening (blatantly ignoring, actually) his counselors. As was our luck (or misfortune) his grandmother worked for the school and was helping in our kitchen. We asked her to come talk to him and he told her to “shut up.” After a few more similar incidents it was decided that it was time to go. At this point nearly every Armenian adult was in an uproar over our decision. We had already told the boy “one more chance” enough times to render our words ineffective and yet all the adults were begging for “one more chance and then he’ll go home….but he’ll behave this time.” The only reason he had stayed as long as he did was the contradictory messages he was being sent. We were firm even as we were begged every day, by new people each time until the camp ended.

As it turned out, the boy came every day anyway with his grandmother and hung on the outskirts and watched and occasionally helped us run errands. In this capacity he was very helpful, getting the one on one attention he needed, and not having to participate in organized games with other kids, which was not his strongpoint. Unfortunately, these points were lost on many of the adults we were working with, partly I am sure due to the utter lack of discipline for boys in this country, and partly due to an unawareness of any type of behavior modification other than verbal and physical abuse. Since we don’t allow either at Green Camps, our resources were a bit more limited. Maybe he would have responded to being smacked upside the head, but I wasn’t willing to find out. I can hope that he walked away from the week thinking that consequences for actions may exist after all, but who can say.

Now I am back in Vayk catching a few minutes of rest before my parents arrive for a visit. I am swamped in paperwork but welcoming the opportunity to sit and breath…. Soon I get to start thinking about what my next project(s) will be, but for now I am looking forward to showing mom and dad around Armenia and to our upcoming trip to Prague. More later…peace!