We Are the Campers

It’s that time of year again: spring. And while young men’s fancies are lightly turning to thoughts of love, volunteers are getting heavily busy with Spring Camp, the Jewel in the Crown of Peace Corps Morocco. Sure, Peace Corps does a lot of things in Morocco and we do a lot of camps outside of just the springtime, but Spring Camp is the centerpiece of inter-sectoral cooperation and without a doubt the one week of the year when more volunteers are working than any other.

Basically, the Ministry selects a scattering of resort cities and other metropoli, accepts several thousand youth to attend (1,700 this year, at 22 camp sites), and then invites the Peace Corps to find as many volunteers as possible to make them work. Currently, there are slightly more than two hundred volunteers stationed in Morocco, which, given the reasonable policy goal of having one volunteer for every ten campers, means that pretty much everyone is needed.

Unfortunately, some volunteers have other work related their sector-specific project objectives to do (all youth development volunteers are required to go to camp for the same reason). Others flat out don’t want to; or, more likely, only want to if they can get in to one of the “cool” camps. Morocco, like any other modern nation-state, has easily more than 22 interesting and attractive cities; the problem is that, again, like any other modern nation-state, they aren’t all evenly dispersed across the country. In fact, most of them are on the coast, which is exactly where all the volunteers want to work at camp.

What follows is called the Scramble, and it is now that a certain, select group of youth development volunteers known as the “Coordinators” earn their fame. The coordinator is in many ways the Cadillac of volunteers; he’s expensive, unnecessarily large, and in charge of making sure that everything works at camp or else assigning the blame when it doesn’t. Being a coordinator is about the best job you can have. (Trust me; I’ve done it twice now.) Aside from making sure that you have enough volunteers to run your camp – which either pretty much happens by itself or isn’t meant to happen at all – and fielding some pre-camp emails and phone calls, you basically do the same thing that everyone else does, only with the added benefit of a paid three-day vacation in Rabat for the Coordinator’s Planning Ball and reaping significantly unproportional amounts of credit for the camp. It really all depends on those unsung heroes: the volunteers. Good volunteers can make a success of a bad camp. A great coordinator, by himself, can’t.

Both of my camps have fallen into the former category. My first was in Khemisset, a mostly uninteresting town near Meknes. While there is little of note about the city itself (aside from its legendary carpet souk and socially progressive gay horses), the camp is easily one of the best in the country. It’s been being run for about five years by excellent staff, and there is now almost no need for a volunteer coordinator whatsoever, which makes it even better. That was last year, however, and rather than continue living in the past, we’re going to talk about this year’s camp: Laarache.

Laarache is the sort of camp that volunteers dream about. The city is located on the coast just a short ways south of Tangier and Asilah, but well enough off of the main track to still be quaint. The town itself can easily be crossed in about a half hour but nonetheless manages to contain a town center, old medina, port, and – most importantly – beaches. Actually, a good amount of the ocean front is more of the rocky bluff variety, but, as it was still early spring when we had camp, the water was too cold to really want to be in it, anyway. And it is precisely there, perched high above the ocean, that the camp center is located.

Laarache, being a small city and only in its second year of camphood, doesn’t have much of a camp apparatus. Both the center and the number of campers are small, which, in my humble opinion, is about the best you can do. Not only is it so much easier to keep a small number of campers pacified and entertained for seven straight days, a small center means there are that many fewer places where they might have run off to make out, do drugs, or stage political revolutions. Only fifty campers were invited, and there was never more than about 48 at any given time.

We might not have had a big camp, but we did have a big staff. Aside from the camp director, we had the mudir of the local dar shebab, two animators-in-training, the center overseer and director and their staff of attendants, a rotating series of Spanish-inspired musicians, and the local athletic coaches, all of whom ranged from moderately to extremely insane. Most notable were the mudir, center director, and three boys who served as general maintenance and other assistance, who were collectively and individually so far off their rockers that being at camp was akin to living in a Marx Brothers film. And, Laarache being a sea-side resort, we had a full contingent of volunteers. We didn’t use our American names (to protect our identities and because half of them are bad words when said in Arabic), but my deepest gratitude goes to Yousef, Lahcen, Ayoub, and Fayza.

And now is about the time that you’re going to ask what it is that we do in camp. Good question, though a better one might be what don’t we do. We don’t operate heavy machinery. Nor do we bale hay or reenact landmark Supreme Court cases. Pretty much everything else is open game. It’s technically an English immersion camp, so we try to speak as much of that as possible – to varying degrees of success – especially in class. We (the volunteers) are also primarily responsible for the early afternoon club time when we try to inculcate the youth of Morocco with American developmental propaganda, most notably with teambuilding games, artistic entrepreneurship, and creative problem solving. There’s also sports time and workshops (another name for Moroccan staff-run clubs) that we either go to and participate in or sit back and enjoy, and every evening we have some kind of thematic soiree. On movie night we watched about two thirds of WALL-E, which got shut down for refusing to be significantly more action-packed and about one third its length shorter, but we also had a flash mob turn into a full-on raving dance party and then a proxy war between religious conservative and secularist values. You never really know what you’re going to get once dinner ends.

Throughout all that, we are programmed to auto-entertainment, be it teaching the kids how to toss a football, participating in completely incomprehensible card games, shocking the world with our ability to speak Darija, or teaching new songs. “Day-O” was a bigger success than I’d expected, and they actually sang “We Are the Campers” on the walk to the sports center, but the pièce de résistance was, without a doubt, “Rise and Shine,” the Peace Corps morning tradition with “camp” substituted for anything religious. Complete with hand gestures and claps, no one other than our Fayza is capable of singing it and maintaining any stitch of dignity, which is probably why it was so successful. (As a side note, some kids at last year’s summer camp asked me to sing our national anthem for them, which I did. I don’t want to brag, but I can sign “The Star-Spangled Banner” pretty well, so you can imagine how I felt when my rendition was met not by adulation but rather quizzical disappointment. Because we always sang “Rise and Shine” after the requisite Moroccan national anthem, they were convinced that was what we do at the beginning of every baseball game. I didn’t know how to let them down gently, so I said that “…We’re at camp another morning” was Francis Scott Key’s second choice.)

I mean, that’s the point of camp. Sure, they learn some English, but ten hours of class isn’t going to make talk show hosts out of them. Don’t get me wrong, we have some incredible linguistic talent at the camp; in fact, one of my favorite things about going is being able to interact with higher level students when basically all of my dar shebab kids are low to high beginners. If I have to teach the present progressive again I’ll probably brain myself to death with a tagine pot, so you can imagine my relief to be able to conduct a class entirely in English and wax theoretical about the various conditionals. But camp, for all its focus on English, is ultimately about the exchange, not only between the volunteers and the campers, but also between the campers and each other. They’re not all from Laarache. And, though Laarache and Ksar Kebir (where most of the rest came from) are pretty close and similar, there’s also the fact that at camp they’re free to be away from their families and some of the more conservative elements of their society. It’s not always easy in Morocco for boys and girls to interact in normal, healthy ways, but no one’s watching them at camp (demonstrated most clearly by the Headscarf Holocaust; every single one had come off by the second day of camp, though some came and went with the weather).

We didn’t have an official name or theme for our camp (some camps do that), but if we had, perhaps we could have called it Camp Discovery. Of course, as soon as we did, no one would have been able to take it seriously ever again, but that was pretty much what we were there for. We taught English in ways that they’d never been taught before (aside from the ones who’d been at camp last year) with songs, games, and a giant Jeopardy competition at the end. We made them re-evaluate the way they think by dropping eggs from the third floor and fording dangerous pools of hot lava, and forced them to express themselves in ways they don’t often get to in their normal schools. We took them out to the ancient ruins of Lixus and showed them that they could learn about the environment while hunting each other through the brambled underbrush, and proved that all it takes is the desire to rock (certainly neither skill nor technology) and any five people can drop Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” like an atomic bomb on the 48 most stunned Moroccan youth in history.

In the end, spring camp’s success – like everything else that we do here – can only be judged by the next generation’s statistical increase in Moroccan babies named Duncan, and, frankly, we just don’t have the time to wait and find out. We’ll never know for certain, through either the public congratulations or the shivers of doubt in the dark solitude of night. All I know is that if Saturday morning departure crying is any indicator, then I’d say we’re looking good.