Edo-Delta Camp – Staff Training

Again, since I don't have pictures from the Edo-Delta Camp yet, here's a picture from last year's Jos 2005 camp. Knitting was also one of the activities we had at the Edo-Delta camp. Teaching people to knit gives them the potential to create something with their hands they can later go sell. It gives them economic potential to better their own lives when the going gets rough. I've also seen people here wear jackets and wool caps in the mornings in Jos when it gets below 85 degrees, so people here have a very different sense of what makes cold weather.

Ok, back to the Edo-Delta Camp. At this point, it probably makes sense to explain a little about the camp structure and what happens at camp. Campers will be placed into huts (cabins) of 8 campers. Each hut has a hut leader (counselor). Each division (Senior Boys, Junior Boys, Senior Girls, Junior Girls) has a hut chief or division leader. The hut chiefs are responsible for the whole division, which means getting the hut leaders to do their jobs. The also report to the senior staff, which is the camp director and assistant director. Coming from Jos, we provided the senior staff and the hut chiefs, while the Edo-Delta DCC would provide the hut leaders. It was these folks that we were planning to spend a little more than 3 days training.

One important thing to realize is that the concept of a youth camp is a foreign idea to Nigeria. They’re very familiar with conferences, where people come and hear a variety of speakers speak, but that’s very much a student-teacher type of relationship. Youth camps are more a series of organized activities with some direct teaching, but most of the learning is interactive and experiential. Our challenge with staff training was to teach the hut leaders how to provide the interactive and experiential experience to their campers, so we did that by putting them through a few days of what camp would be like. We spent a lot of time reminding the hut leaders that this was a camp, and not a conference, so they were going to have to think about things differently than they were used to. For the staff that was there through most of the training, I think they did a good job understanding.

As I said previously, the camp staff was supposed to come for training on Sunday evening. We’d been told by the DCC to expect about 130 campers and 25 staff, and that would be very good numbers for a DCC having their first ever camp. When no one had arrived by 5pm on Sunday, we went into Benin City to get some ice cream. When we got back, there were about 6 people waiting for us, not all of whom were camp staff. There was just one female hut leader and a couple of male hut leaders, so that evening we gave them an introduction to what the camp would be like and told them that the next morning, we would start running through the camp schedule so they could experience what the campers would experience. Staff would slowly trickle in over the next few days, giving us 10-12 staff by the time campers started arriving on Thursday. We had two more show up with the campers, so they got the 20-minute staff orientation and were sent off to work.

The Edo-Delta camp schedule was a little different from the Jos camp schedule, but here’s what it would look like:
6:00 am – All Staff Devotions
6:30 am – Capers (campers clean up their huts and an assigned area of the camp grounds)
7:00 am – Bath and dress
7:45 am – Divisional Call (the Hut Chiefs lead a brief song and devotion before Morning Watch)
8:00 am – Morning Watch (this is what we call quiet time alone with God at camp – we used the booklets I had helped write during my first few weeks in Jos)
8:40 am – Flag Raising (a time to pray for the nation of Nigeria and its leaders)
8:50 am – Breakfast
9:30 am – Bible Exploration (bible study led by hut leaders with their huts – aka Bible Ex)
10:30 am – Canteen (Campers can buy snacks and drinks)
11:00 am – Success Talk (speaker)
12:00 pm – Activity One (each hut leader and staff would teach an activity such as Football, Drama, Singing, Cooking, etc.)
1:15 pm – Lunch
2:00 pm – Rest Hour
2:45 pm – Canteen
3:00 pm – Carnival (jokes, riddles, and silly games/contests)
3:50 pm – Activity Two
5:00 pm – Sports/Games
6:15 pm – Hut Break (time for campers to wash up for dinner)
6:30 pm – Dinner
7:30 pm – Evening Program
9:00 pm – Hut Devotions
10:00 pm – Lights Out

A quick additional comments about flag raising: Nigeria is a collection of many different tribes collected together in a nation formed by their European conquerors years ago. People don’t always think of themselves as having loyalty to their country the way Americans display patriotism because it was a bit of a false construct imposed upon them. Flag raising helps encourage people to pray for their country and those in leadership. It’s a good way to encourage people to pray about what the leaders are doing rather than simply complain, which happens a lot here. I think we in the US can learn from this too, at times. Akim and Ema are both former campers who now help out as camp staff, and they both indicated that the flag raising portion of the camp helped them think of themselves as Nigerians, and give them a stronger heart for seeing the nation succeed as a whole.

Anyway, that’s the idealized camp schedule as it was supposed to run, but as you might imagine from many of the other posts we’ve put on this Blog, things here often don’t go as planned. I can’t think of a single day I was down in Benin City that we followed the schedule exactly, but I’m getting ahead of myself a little, as I’m supposed to be talking about the staff training.

The staff were supposed to be trained from Sunday night through Thursday morning, with Monday through Wednesday following the regular camp schedule as closely as made sense. Since we only had a few staff arrive on Sunday, we really got started Monday morning with the folks we had. Everything went according to schedule most of the morning. For Bible Ex, we taught the bible studies that the hut leaders would have to teach during camp with the theme of the camp being Psalm 23:1 – “The Lord is my shepherd.” Instead of the success talk and evening programs, Claudia and the other staff would teach the hut leaders about what camp was to be like.

One of the challenges we dealt with throughout the staff training was that the camp cooks weren’t going to arrive till camp started, so all our meals were being prepared by women of the local church and then brought to the camp. That meant that we never knew exactly when we would eat our meals, even though we’d provided them with a schedule of our meal times. For example, our lunch on Monday didn’t arrive till about 5 pm, which in turn meant that our dinner arrived at about 9:30 pm. Often it was late simply because they were waiting for transportation to bring it to us, and we were always grateful when it arrived, but we often spent time just waiting around because we were expecting it soon.

For sports on Monday and Wednesday, we played football (soccer!) and everyone was eager to see how the bature (white man) would fare. I had told them I wasn’t very good, having played very little football over the years. The only time I used to play regularly was in elementary school, to give you an idea of my experience, although I did play a lot while we were in Honduras with Blackhawk Church two years ago, but that was only a week long trip. I figured I would play hard and that would make up for whatever lack of skill was present. I did my best to pass and played what I considered pretty good defense, including a pretty good slide tackle to prevent a goal once. I also played some goalie and managed to have some saves, including one where I stopped Ema one-on-one. I thought he went easy on me, but still was surprised he hadn’t scored, as he had me on the ground. Akim paid me a big compliment when he told me I was much better than advertised and that I “didn’t play like an American.” I later found out that this means I dribbled and passed instead of just booting the ball up-field.

Despite the low staff turnout, it seemed as though the staff really was getting the idea. Claudia had spoken about how the camp was really a construction site, and we were building campers. We talked about what we wanted to build into each camper, and what the tools we were going to use to do that. One of the biggest was the idea that at camp, each hut leader would be a role model and mentor to their campers. Akim spoke about how each camper was similar and different to a lump of clay. It was an interesting analogy that got the staff thinking about what youths are like and how we can influence them both for better and for worse. We also spoke about things that our parents or elders did when we were growing up that we found helpful in our lives and things they didn’t do that we wished they had done. All of this were things that we ought to try to do for our campers. As we shared our responses, the staff also began to realize that everyone is a little different in what they need and what they find useful.

By the time staff training was done, we were eager for the campers to arrive, but we were also wary about the limited staff we had. We only had 2 female hut leaders by the time we went to bed on Wednesday, which meant that Joyce would have to take on that role, too. I felt like the staff training hadn’t gone very quickly because of all the sessions of talks and also the fact that we spent a lot of time waiting around for our meals. Camp, I hoped, would be move much smoother.