Edo-Delta Camp – First Impressions

Since I was gone for 10 days for the Edo-Delta Camp, I’m going to try to consolidate this to a few different posts. Also, I wasn't able to bring my camera with me, and I don't yet have a copy of the video we took while there, so I'm going to post some other fun pictures that we haven't let everyone see yet. This picture is of the cooks at the Jos camp from last year. They're preparing some meat, and in the background you can see the pots on the fires.

On April 8, Claudia came and picked me up at 7:30 am so we could head down to the the Edo-Delta DCC for the first ECWA Camp Youth Alive in the south! ECWA divides it’s churches into District Church Councils, and the Edo-Delta one broke off of Lagos two years ago. Camp was to be held just outside of Benin City, a 10 hour drive south of Jos, where we’re staying while here in Nigeria. I was a little nervous about the trip as I’d been told that the weather would be really hot and humid (Jos is hot, but very dry). I was also expecting to eat a lot of Nigerian food and didn’t know if I’d like it or if my stomach would be able to handle it all. Also, we’d been told that the youth in and near Benin City are somewhat hostile, and would prove to be difficult campers. However, this is exactly why I came to Nigeria: to help out with the camp ministry, so I was very excited to be going, too.

Along for the trip were Claudia (camp director), Akim (assistant director/activities), Yusuf (crafts/music/hut chief), Ema (sports/hut chief), and Joyce (hut chief). The drive down gave me an opportunity to experience many things I hadn’t experienced in Jos. First, we stopped for breakfast in what can best be described as a shanty market. I had some bread and a fried egg from a “restaurant” that consisted of two rickety wooden benches and a single proprietor who cooked over a small fire. I had been warned by SIM personnel that the food in these types of places isn’t always safe to eat, but on a trip like this I was to experience a lot of things, and since everyone else was eating there, I wasn’t too worried about it. The drive was long and rather uneventful, and we started to approach Benin City late in the afternoon. We also noticed, as we went further south, that the buildings were older. Most roofs here are made of corrugated metal, and while many in Jos still shine silver, the roofs further south were brown with rust. The terrain had also changed from something that resembled a woodland savannah to jungle. We passed a huge palm tree orchard as the sun was setting, and it was very beautiful. Camp was to be held at a school, and we pulled in to the gate a little after dark, which was around 6:30 pm.

I noticed two things as I got out of the truck: I was very stiff and sore from squeezing 4 in the backseat of the truck for the past 10 hours, and it was DANG HUMID! I started sweating right away. After a dinner of rice at one of the pastor’s houses, we went back to the school and found bunk beds in one of the staff buildings. As I slept that first night, I continued to wake up repeatedly throughout the night with sweat running down my face from the humidity. Almost the whole time I was down there, I’ve never experienced so much heat and humidity in combination to make me sweat as much as I did, and it didn’t let up at night, making it hard for me to sleep well while I was there.

The next day was Palm Sunday, and the staff would be arriving in the evening to begin their training. We went around to the different parts of the camp and prayed for the different buildings and the field, that they would be places where the campers would be safe, have fun, and learn what God wanted them to learn during camp. Having little idea of what schools were like in Nigeria (I’d only seen missionary or village schools to this point), I was surprised at how extensive the school compound was. The school is just off them main road into Benin City, and after entering the gate there is a large football (soccer for you Americans) field on the right. To the left is a large hall where we would have our all-camp gatherings. Directly in front were school offices and along the length of the field was a long building with 6 classrooms in it. There were 3 identical buildings parallel and behind this building. At the far end of the classroom buildings was a two story building with a large room on each floor that would become our dining hall. We prayed for each of these buildings and the field.

We would stay in staff quarters located behind the gathering hall. The school did not have a connection to NEPA (Nigerian electric company), so a generator was used in the evening to provide power for our building. It also provided power for the water pump which would pump water into a holding tank located at the far end of the football field. If the tank ran dry, we would no longer have running water. The staff quarters I stayed in did have a toilet (bucket flushed) and sink, and there was also a shower which was really just a pipe with water coming out. There was no hot water, but with the heat there, that was never a problem as I never wanted it!

One other thing worth mentioning in this post is the food I ate while away. The whole time I was at camp, both during the staff training and the actual camp, our food was cooked by a group of Nigerian cooks. I did my best to eat all that was provided for me. Breakfast was almost always plain white bread with tea, and I was dumbfounded by how much plain white bread my Nigerian friends could eat! I was served curried beans regularly. Sometimes with fried plantains, other times with boiled yams, and occasionally just by themselves. The beans became my favorite dish there, which given how little I enjoy beans at home surprised me greatly, but it was nice because we had this almost every day for lunch! I also ate semovita with a variety of sauces. Semovita is a dough-like substance made from the inside of corn kernels. You eat it by ripping off a piece and dipping it in egussi or vegetable sauce. Gari, made from cassava, was eaten in two ways. When prepared in epa form, it’s eaten like semovita. It’s also served in a powder/flake form, in which case you mix it with water and you can then either drink it or eat it with a spoon. Gari in this form soaks up water and expands quite a bit, so people joked that the gari was a 24-hour meal while the semovita was a 12-hour meal because of how much gari expands in your stomach. I liked the epa form of gari, but not the powdery one. Semovita wasn’t one of my favorites either. We were also occasionally served rice with some sauce on it. Absolutely everything was very spicy, so if for some reason I had cooled enough to the point where the humidity was not making me sweat, the food would. I was glad that I had learned to eat spicy food growing up, because it really was quit hot. The Nigerians told me that you can tell if someone is healthy by whether or not they sweat while eating the food. I will say that the one value of sweating this much is that even a warm breeze feels a little cooler when you’re soaking wet. Despite the fact that I ate all sorts of new and unusual foods to my taste, I never had a problem with anything I ate.