C. A. M. P.

Alice Cooper once said, “School’s out for summer; school’s out forever; school’s been blown to pieces.” Of the above, at least 33% is true right now of Morocco, and when there’s no school, there’s camp.

For Peace Corps volunteers, particularly in youth development, this means El Jedida. El Jedida, once a Portuguese coastal fortress, is now a quaint sea town known for its beaches, its fish, its colonial medina and cistern, and the El Jedida English Immersion Summer Camp. For the past five years or so, every youth development volunteer has spent from two to eight weeks with the children of Morocco, teaching them English, taking them to the beach, encouraging them to rise and shine in the morning, guiding them through science and theatre clubs, and staging mock Halloweens.

The summer can be pretty slow for YD with Dar Shebabs closed and organizations (and youth) on vacation. It can also be a pretty miserable place to live with temperatures above the 100s for months on end (not the case in Freedonia, but we’ve already established that the weather here is significantly cooler than you’d expect from Morocco). El Jedida is not only a welcome breeze and a cool ocean, it’s also a place where you can relax your cultural integration and spend time with a dozen other Americans who’ve been similarly starved of the English language. You can finally speak an intelligible sentence (given a few days of recuperation), tell a joke that people will get without having it be explained to them, and comment on one another’s mothers without really offending someone.

And let’s not forget the children. We’ve talked about how each volunteer gets to send a group of scholarshipped youth to the camp. The other half of the camp is kids who paid their way, mostly from Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakesh, and the other major cities. It’s amazing to see the difference between these (often) Westernized city folk and the (generally) country youth that come from Peace Corps sites, but incredible when you see them generally getting along with each other. Sure, the cityites tend to couple off into forbidden romances (which, thank The Maker, are not the responsibility of PCVs to deal with) and the (typically) more conservative free riders don’t, but at the end of the week party they all dance to both tecktonik and sha’abia, and they all want to come back next year.

As you might guess, I love camp. I love seeing my fellow volunteers, getting to see new places, and getting to interact with new kids. I did an earlier camp in spring in Khemisset, and I’m helping with another camp now in Freedonia. Summer camp probably rates in the middle in terms of the experience. It’s hot in El Jedida, and the water seems to have made everyone sick, but I found myself with a great group of kids. Khemisset was probably the best only because my English class was a high intermediate level (something I haven’t taught since I left my last job back in Franklin, Massachusetts), and the kids were there because they wanted to learn (something I also hadn’t really had since Franklin). In Jedida they were the lowest beginners, which meant some really enthusiastic learners and a fair portion that were at camp for everything else. We got along fine, but it was nothing new.

We also had the pleasure of meeting the Minister of Youth and Sports herself, Ms Nawal El Moutawakel. That was pretty cool, and I got to shake her hand and explain why the game Clue is useful English-language training, but it was also a bit of a frustration. The camp director told us just after lunch that the minister would be coming, so we prepared a “model camp.” This is when the kids are divided into groups to demonstrate a full day’s worth of activities simultaneously so that Moroccan bureaucrats can feel secure in their positions within the ministry. We had an advanced-level class, a sports group, theatre and science clubs, some guitar lessons, and a few library patrons. That’s where I was, teaching a couple kids how to play Clue and trying to keep my references to Tim Curry and Madeline Khan to a minimum. We finished our first game and they had a general hang of what was going on, so we did one more just to solidify their understanding. That one finished, too, and the kids started looking around for something else, but the minister was not there yet, so we were commanded to give it another go.

Four hours after opening our package from the Parker Brothers, Ms El Moutawakel pulled up, toured our library, shook my hand, told the children that, if they were lucky, they might learn enough English to visit me in New Jersey, continued her inspections, posed for a photo, and left. Obviously, she’s a quite important woman, and certainly busy. As far as I know, this was the first time she’d ever visited the joint venture between the Peace Corps and Ministry of Youth and Sports. Still, you have to feel bad for the kids who sat through a one-hour English class for four hours, or the basketball players forced to continue their lay-ups in the summer heat. That’s what happens, I guess, when low-level minions find themselves under the boss’s hammer. The worst, though, are the two poor boys who were on the computers. No child was ever allowed to use them during camp – but the minister was certainly not going to learn that – so they assigned two to sit in front and make like they were learning something with the help of advanced technology. You know that these two strutted like prize turkeys in front of everyone else. Then they found out it was Thanksgiving; they had to sit and copy documents into a Word file over and over and over again. One practically got expelled when he was seen playing a game of Solitaire. That’s one way to encourage kids to pick up a book.

And that wasn’t all the visiting we got. A news team from Moroccan television’s Channel 4 spent the better part of the week with us, recording almost everything that we did that took place in the tent closest to the pool table where the crew liked to spend every available moment loosing their change. They were pretty cool, though, and even stayed around for Halloween. By the time we’d turned off the haunted house, the cute little reporter’s face was painted up like Tim Burton’s worst nightmare, and the cameramen were locked in an apple-bobbing blood feud. And she came back the next evening to get everyone’s digits for future news reporting (though I have a strong feeling that she won’t be making it out into the countryside hamlets we surprised on her when she asked), and ended up dancing the night away with the kids at their last night hootenanny.

Camp started out on a pretty rough note. I had the pleasure of enduring a five-hour train ride in 90+ degree stagnation and a good 100% humidity, learning that El Jedida is not a good place to have a cool glass of water, and remembering that every time I sat down for a meal in the cafeteria. But the city is pretty funky, I got to be named Duncan for twelve days in a row, Halloween is my favorite holiday (we succeeded in getting a handful of kids in tears from the shear terror of our haunted staff room), I hadn’t seen some of the other volunteers since before swearing-in, and, like an amateur summer production of 12 Angry Men, the weather was pleasant and cool as I rode the train back home. I’m happy to be back here in Freedonia, but I miss Jedida already.

Only eleven-and-a-half months to go before we do it again.