This was a different camp because it wasn’t run by volunteers but by an organization that had had volunteers in the past. It was sponsored by Shell and was outdoors, meaning being with the kids 24 hours a day. Well, I did get a tent to myself for part of the time. The staff consisted of Natalya, the stuttering matriarch of the organization, her husband Vasilly, the stuttering son Misha (I only point out the stuttering because with my level of Russian, it could be hard to follow their conversations sometimes), his wife, the absent Olessya who showed up for only 2 days, and twin wonders Andrei and Vova. I ended up being here about 11 or 12 days.
I need to preface that some of this was a few things that transpired beforehand. My regional manager contacted me about a month or so before the summer and proffered this camp to me. I had nothing planned for this time period, so I said I’d be able to help out with the camp with the hope that I could scrounge up some auxiliary support from other volunteers. Very shortly after this, the older volunteers in my oblast started telling me I shouldn’t do this camp because it was poorly executed the last year and that the organization didn’t allocate their resources smartly. I was stuck though, or at least to keep my integrity at least in myself I was stuck. To be fair, one of the contentions was that they had not fed the kids enough, which was not the case this year, so they had improved upon experiences from the past.
So, I arrived at the camp and they had set up a bunch of tents and a yurt along with a cooking area. I will eventually post photos on Facebook (I can’t on the blog because it’s technically blocked in Kazakhstan and too much work to e-mail my sister, who posts these, all the photos). This was not roughing it in the Boy Scout sense. They had brought two huge propane tanks and an actual stove. Guess hot dogs on a stick don’t fly. We had a couple of tents to eat meals under, but one was broken by the gale-force winds the first night before the kids came. I mean, the wind was like a banshee on speed.
So the first week was the little kids 10-13, who were awesome. Every activity I did, whether it was first aid or American football or improvised percussion instruments, they loved. There was kid in particular, Kolya, who spoke four languages, and I swore spoke better English than most of the people in the United States. Another one who stuck out in my mind was Madina, a small little Kazakh girl who was willing to try out everything, including swimming. I’m proud to say by the end of the week she was able to do the front crawl. There was a small problem in that I was the only volunteer who showed up for this and had the brunt of the tasks to do activities. I mean, there were supposed to be other people helping, like Olessya, who only showed up for 2 days because she was doing registration in Karaganda instead of helping out, but we’re kind of regarded as Supermen who can do everything. So I played with the kids, taught the kids, sang with the kids worked myself into a state of exhaustion. During this period I was sharing a tent with Andrei and Vova, who slept like it was a full-contact sport. In short, I was tired. Those two also spent more time flirting with the teenage girls than actually doing anything to help a brother out.
The midpoint was when the crew from Shell came to see how their grant was working out. I liked to think of this as the dog-show moment, where everybody put on their best faces. So, the traditional action is to make a song and dance and tour everything about the camp. I was particularly perturbed because I had done some improvised percussion stuff with the kids, which Natalya had taken to mean that these kids were savants and Mozarts even though most of them had no musical ability whatsoever. As sullen as I may have been, I had to put on a smile (okay, tried not to frown) and prepare them for an impromptu concert. The people from Shell were actually pretty cool. They actually brought a bunch of activities for the kids to do, like a version of Jeopardy and brainstorm sessions on health and other things. In essence, what the organizers of this camp should have done. But, I got to socialize with the Westernized directors of Shell who came out, and the older kids replaced the younger ones.
The older kids SUCKED! I know that teenagers don’t want to stick out because they’re “cool,” but why would you come out to a camp in the middle of nowhere if you wanted to just sit and text your friends all day. Some things are universal, and the constantly flashing thumbs across a dial-pad are now becoming ubiquitous among youth across the world, or at least in my humble opinion. So, with the generator broken (yes, they brought a generator to charge cell phones), most of the girls (and there was only one boy) were sulking the whole time. Come on, they had a cute American for eye candy. Haha. One girl actually came with one-inch nails, which seem ineffectual in normal life but completely useless in a camp. It was worse because the whether was extremely windy and cold. We wore sweaters the whole time because the wind cut with the precision of a sushi chef. In general, the mood was low with blips upward with the different activities prepared by moi. The whole thing ended on a sour note when two girls left early, plus the boy because he had spent a night in the girls’ tent. To make a long story short, there were lots of people passing by for day trips. Well, some of the girls heard voices and got scared so they asked this guy, Ablai Khan, to keep an eye on them. Lord knows if this was true or not, but the moral of the story is that they should have awoken one of the adults, preferably the one with a black belt. Teenagers not thinking is what it amounted to, at least in my opinion. So this came out in the morning, and Kazakhstan being more conservative in mindset, no matter how girls dress, he was sent home. I’d hate to see how the family reaction was to that.
That’s not to say that the whole time with the older kids was bad. We played some games, did scavenger hunts, picked wild thyme and practiced their English skills. I also taught them a bunch of card games, which they enjoyed enough that I left a deck of cards with them. I think it was definitely a learning experience. I learned new ways to entertain and educate kids through a difficult situation, and I think it was probably very fruitful. Now if you don’t mind, I’m, gonna take a nap and wake up in about 30 years.
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