Edo-Delta Camp – Camp Arrives!

Here's some folks playing volleyball at the Jos campground. The camp encourages sports where everyone can play. For example, we may play Crazy Soccer, where the men have to play with their hands clasped behind their back, the women can pick up the ball a la rugby, and as many as 4 balls are in play at once. It keeps the game lively and active, and while many campers don't like the idea at first, the soon realize how fun it is once they start to play.

Thursday morning we woke up with the anticipation of campers coming between 2 and 5 pm. We finished up some training in the morning and also finished moving the classroom benches into the dining hall so campers would have tables to eat at (they were awfully heavy!). We got registration organized and then had to wait. Although we had 2 campers by noon, no one else showed up till after 5 pm, and they didn’t finish coming till after 10 pm. By the end of the day, we had about 55 campers. That was far fewer than the 130 we were told to expect, but Claudia mentioned that for a DCC’s first camp, 50-60 is a pretty good turn out. In the same way that staff had come over several days, campers would continue to come during camp and we finished with a total of 92 campers, 20 of which didn’t come till Saturday or Sunday.

Friday was the first real day of camp, and we began with our regular schedule. I had been up till 3 AM the night before, sorting out camper activity preferences with Akim, Ema, and Claudia, so I’d gotten less than 4 hours sleep and was not in a good mood. It didn’t help that the campers didn’t come to division call when the whistle was blown. We sent them off to do their morning watch, and then went on to flag raising. It seemed as though they found the whole formality of it all tedious and strange. They laughed at the way the color guard marched in the colors, but the did pay attention when Claudia spoke about the need for prayer over the nation. I was going to teach drama during the activity one hour, but other hut leaders had volunteered to do that so I offered to do an improve comedy class a la Comedy Sportz. I wasn’t too surprised that no one signed up since I wasn’t sure they would understand what it was, and I was glad to have the hour free. I hoped to use the time to catch up on sleep from the night before, but with new campers arriving I helped with their registration instead. At lunch, we had bean curry but didn’t have enough spoons for everyone, so some campers and the staff had to wait for others to finish. Meal time was a bit unruly as campers didn’t understand why we wanted them to stay at their tables with their hut-mates instead of getting up to talk to friends in other huts. They also wanted to leave the dining hall as soon as they were done eating, which was also not part of how we wanted their meal time experience. They also wanted to socialize and wash up right after lunch, and because of all this, most didn’t get to rest hour until it was half over.

Campers were very slow in coming to Carnival time, and when Akim asked for volunteers, no one wanted to come up front. We practically begged for a few, and finally got some. Akim got four teams of two people and blindfolded them, then gave them each a bag of ground nuts (peanuts), and the first to feed each other all their nuts would be the winner. Campers erupted in laughter as groundnuts were fed to people’s eyes, throats, and noses instead of their mouths, and the apathy and apprehension surrounding Carnival were starting to fade. We also gave 6 campers each a 35 cl bottle of Fanta and a straw, then had a contest to see who could drink it the fastest. The whole camp was shocked to see a girl win, and she became an instant celebrity.

The second activity hour I had volunteered to teach knot-tying. I didn’t really know what people would make of it, but figured I had learned enough knots in Boy Scouts that I could teach some basic ones. Campers were again slow in coming to the activities, and it was clear that they were getting tired of being shuttled around from one thing to the next. I had 8 campers come to my knot tying class, and I asked them their names and why they had come. All but 2 of them said they didn’t know what knot tying would be so they figured it would be something new and interesting. Now, I didn’t actually have any rope, so the next thing I did with them was a human knot, where everyone stands in a circle, grabs hands with someone else, and then we try to undo the knot. None of the campers had ever done anything like it before, and when they saw the initial tangle of arms they looked at me for guidance in how to undo themselves. I told them I wasn’t going to help and that they needed to figure it out themselves, at which point they told me they didn’t think it could be done. I told them I’d seen it done over and over again, and eventually Chimdindu took charge and suggested a few maneuvers that began to help. Slowly, people started to believe it could be done and when we finished with a full circle again, they were truly excited. I learned the next day that several had gone back to their huts and taught their friends the same game, which I thought was really neat. Like I said, I didn’t have any rope, so I untied my shoes and as we passed around my shoelaces, people learned the square knot and the slip knot before it was time for games. Most people in Nigeria were leather sandals, so mine were the only shoelaces we had to go around, but they worked fine, and people seemed genuinely interested in learning the knots.

After Activity Two was Sports/Games, and when the whistle blew and I went out to the field, Ema was trying to get everyone together. The hut leaders were not getting their campers to the field, and the campers were all just wandering around camp chatting. It was very frustrating. Some of the male campers went to the field expecting to play football, and then left when they learned we wouldn’t be doing that. The female campers didn’t come in the first place because they also expected the men would be playing football. Ema left in frustration, and when I saw him I told him I’d try to help get the campers together and that he should come out again. I went off and found campers starting to congregate on the field, and a minute or two later Ema came out and we managed to get most of the campers ready for sports. Ema started us off with some warm-up exercises, much to the groans of the campers, but they participated, and found them very funny in a way I didn’t fully understand. Ema then got the campers into two teams and we did a relay race where each team had to pass a ball to the person behind them through their legs. They really found this entertaining, too, and Claudia later told me that they don’t really have Physical Education in schools here the way we do in the U.S., so these types of games are totally new to them. Accusations of cheating on the other team were rampant and there was much rejoicing when one team finally won.

When we went to wash up after the games, the running water at camp had stopped. We’d used up the water in the water tank and campers were not excited. The school generator had broken and there was no way to pump water up into the tank. Dinner proved to be chaotic. The dining hall wasn’t connected to the standard generator so a spare had been brought in, but this one was too powerful for the fluorescent lights and burnt out the bulbs, resulting in darkness in the dining hall until we managed to get enough candles so each table could have one (the rest of our dinners would be by candlelight). Meals at camp were served buffet style and huts were called to come get food in order, but as soon as some campers had finished their meals they would come up for seconds before others had gotten anything at all. It seemed as if everyone was talking very loudly in the echo-y room and no one was staying at their table. Claudia was not happy, and at this point I had gotten so frustrated with the constant battle to get campers to behave according to the camp rules that I wondered if they’d ever get anything out of camp at all. It was probably the low point of the camp for me and I was very frustrated.

After dinner, we went to the main hall for the evening program which was to be the Oprah Winfrey show. One of the female hut leaders was Oprah, and she was to have four guests. When I got to the hall, I found out that I was one of the guests! The show was to be questions about relationships to give campers a godly perspective on dating, and Yusuf was supposed to be the married man on the panel but he’d left with the truck to try to get the generator fixed so we would have water the next morning. So I became the married man on the panel. I answered some questions about what my relationship with Barbara was like during the dating and courtship phases, but it was also awkward in that no one laughed at the parts of the story I thought were funny. After the show, Uncle Victor (all the staff were referred to as Uncle or Auntie), who is the Edo-Delta DCC chairmen spoke to the campers about their behavior during the day. He talked about how the camp was not a conference and how the campers needed to do better to follow the schedule and the requests we made for appropriate camp behavior. It was very awkward to me, and I felt a little embarrassed that I had come down from Jos, from the U.S. even, and was imposing a completely different set of behavioral rules on these people than they were used to. At the same time, I knew that the rules were there to help them learn lessons in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. I went to bed frustrated and tired, hoping Saturday would be better.