Life at Permanent Site and Summer Camp Part Deux

As the summer winds on here in Akhalkalaki and we get some weeks at permanent site under our belts (been here for 3 and a half weeks so far), we've slowly started to piece together a daily routine that is more involved and more social. When we first got here, it was quite a shock to our systems--we had come straight from our 10-week pre-service training (or PST in Peace Corps parlance), where every waking second was planned for us, filled with homework, classes, training, practicum, etc. Once we got to site, we no longer had a set routine, we no longer were surrounded by other volunteers and we had to start from square one with our host families, getting to know them and working through all the issues we had long resolved in our PST host families (like what foods we like to eat and how much is a normal amount for us to eat and why we don't especially like food that is prepared with half a bottle of sunflower oil).

Since it is summer, we won't get started back to school and teaching and a daily routine until mid-September. Until that time, we are supposed to be working to integrate into the community (by getting to know people here) and we should start to look at what the community lacks, and what sorts of secondary projects we could undertake during our service (our primary project, of course, being to teach English in the schools and transfer skills and new methodologies to our English teacher counterparts). We should also find language tutors to continue improving our language skills.

For the first week here, we were extremely proud of ourselves if we had one planned activity outside of the house, be it a meeting with one of the English teachers at our school, with someone from one of the local NGOs (non-governmental organizations) or with someone else from the community. We spent a lot of time just talking with our host family, going for long walks (and morning runs) around town, studying, reading and talking on the phone with other volunteers about how we would possibly find things to fill the time until September. Remember, we were used to being busy from 9am to 6pm, surrounded by other English-speaking volunteers and having homework to keep us busy all the time. In short, it was a fairly difficult transition to make, to come to permanent site in the summer. Even the volunteers in the business and social entrepreneurship program (working with NGOs) have had a rough go of it, many of them finding that, although they go to work each day, that does not necessarily imply that they have things to do (since summer time means that many organization employees are off for trainings or vacation, leaving the office fairly deserted).

More recently, though, things have been starting to pick up for us, the main reason being that we have started holding our summer camp for kids in town. We previously wrote about the 4-day summer camp we hosted in Kortaneti, where we played games with the kids focused on improving their English skills. Each Education volunteer here is supposed to hold a summer camp that is at least 7 days long, for at least 2 hours per day. Sam and I each have to host a camp, and we started asking questions about how we could do this from our first day at site.

As it turns out, our town for the past two years has put on a free camp for all the kids here, ages 9-14. They fund the camp from the town budget, and provide the kids with lunch each day. They take 120-125 kids for 15 days straight to a nice forested area just outside of the city and let them play games and just generally be outside and able to run around. Each morning at 11am, the kids gather outside of the town hall and a bus takes them to the camp, picking them back up again at 4pm. The camp has two shifts, with 125 different kids able to attend for 15 days (so it runs for 30 total days). When we started asking questions about camp, our counterparts and school directors talked with local government officials about just having us join up with the preexisting camp. Sam and I had a nice chat with some folks from the local government and it was decided that we could plan English activities and games for the kids for 12 days, for 2-3 hours each day.

We were anxious about the camp at first; it's a lot of kids and we didn't know what to expect in terms of English levels or interest in playing educational games. Moreover, we were nervous about what the local government employees would think of us. But having a pre-set location and time and setting and guaranteed group of kids was far too good an option to pass on, so we agreed to run our camp in conjunction with the town camp. We sat for a while discussing what kinds of games and lessons we would try to teach and wrote out fairly detailed lesson plans and got all our materials together and crossed our fingers.

Happily, the experience we gained during our training summer camp was extremely helpful in getting us prepared for this summer camp. We've played lots of games, focused on teaching (or refreshing) English. The varying levels of English knowledge among the kids has been a bit of a challenge (we have kids who have not studied any English, as well as kids who have studied for anywhere between 1 and 5 years of English). We try to run activities and play games that require different levels of knowledge, though, which seems to work pretty well. On each day we have a rotating group of between 15 and 30 students, playing games, singing songs and working to speak in English as much as possible.

So far we have had 6 days of camp. Yesterday we got a day off, as Sunday was the last of the first 15 days and the new group of students would need to be put together for the second set of campers. We'll get a chance today to see how this second group pans out--although the first round of camp taught us a lot of lessons about properly planning for camp (seems to be a good idea to start each day with some big, loud, running type of game to draw kids in for the quieter, more focused speaking exercises, which should then be broken up by another running, crazy activity, and so on).

We'll finish this round of summer camp on Sunday, August 8 and have almost finished the summer camp requirements at that point (having done 12 total days of camp, each of us responsible for and "in charge" of 6 of those days). As we began planning with the town officials for camp, though, two of them mentioned having teenage kids who were too old for the camp but would still love to have the chance to meet with us and practice their English and couldn't we do something for these high school students too? Not wanting to bite the hand that feeds us, we decided to just do 12 days of camp with these younger kids and agreed to do a shorter (2-4 days) "camp" with some of the older students afterward. That's our plan for now, as long as we make it through the next six days of camp!