English Camp

So this week I was in Dakar for English camp. It was with this really neat program that puts teams of PCVs in different highschools to run whatever kind of English program we can think of for four hours a day for five days.

Our big group had a big school. Actually it was, or so they said, the largest lycee in Senegal. I feel like someone said eight or nine thousand students. It had a big campus. So twelve of us volunteers had about 140 students for the week. We all called them 'kids' but they were not that far from our age, most around 19 and 20. Most of them spoke at least marginally understandable english, but they all wanted to hear moer native speakers teaching them because getting the same accented language all the time from one or two people will stunt your understanding of it if you try to use it in a real scenario.

Anyway, so we were there to do whatever we could think of that would be fun and educational. Over the course of the week we had small group discussions, we played interactive games in the class room, we played sports and games outside including a rediculous game we dubbed 'frizball' and kickball. We also had an olympics day where the five main events were a three-legged race, a frizbee toss game, a ball toss game, a sack race and a tournament of tug of war. We talked about american culture vs senegalese culture, politics and even had some really interesting gender roles discussions. The last day we had them put on gender roles plays and we had a little party with food and drink that more or less fell apart under poor organization and too few food with too many kids.

All in all though it was an amazing week. It was exhausting, it was difficult, I learned a lot, and it was really fun, definetly worth it and apt for my possible future considerations that may be discussed later. I took some pictures, but others took more I know, i just dont know how to find where they are now. But my pictures will be up at some point, along with stuff from rainy season at site.