spring camp

there is a small city, hemmed in by mountains, at the end of the Moroccan map. Figuig, city of palms, cut off from its Berber brothers in algeria, walled city. thats where i went to help out with spring camp. the only people i knew there were antonio and dunia (to use their moroccan names), but it turns out we had a really great crew! all good workers, cheerful, even in the face of adversity. i had so much fun getting to know them and having fun bringing the american to english language immersion spring camp!
figuig is a very long way from just about anywhere. it took me two days to get to Bouarfa, where we were stuck for a night because of the torrential rains. Figuig is in the desert. just across the border there are proper Saharan ergs (dunefields). but the drive down looked more like... the Serengeti. it's a high plateau, flat mostly, some slow-rolling hills, and the occasional small, rocky, morocco style mountain massif thrusting through. but it was all covered with... grass... and flowers... great streaks of purple, yellow, green, reaching to the horizon! sosososo beautiful. i miss green!!! the bus ride down from oujda takes a few hours. and it was allllll greeennnnn.... sigh of contentment...
camp was fun. the kids enjoyed it, when they weren't busy being too cool for school (some things never change). we had a raining inside incident involving all of the girls lugging their mattresses to the guys room to sleep without being dripped on from above. we had a door become unopenable, and the lock had to be knocked off with a sledgehammer. we had the 'pink vest boy', desire of the heart of every moroccan teenage girl. we had leapfrog, charades, dancing, halloween, and lots of english classes. we had a traditional wedding drum song, and one of the girls was 'taken by the music' and did the crazy hair dance. the environment club (me, antonio, nate and 15 kids) planted a medicinal plants garden (so much fun!! getting my hands in the dirt felt great!). we went for a hike to a fish-farm/irrigation pool.
we had the 'walled city' effect. people who have been subject to raiders for centuries (and still have the walls to prove it), who are separated from their trading routes by rather arbitrary borders that are now indefinitely closed, who are proudly berber in the very Arab eastern region, are walled people. they dont trust us or each other very well. and it made it hard to do silly team building activities that americans like to do at camp. you could literally see the tension between kids from different towns at times. there was a fight. did we make any headway? maybe. its hard to tell. but we tried!!! team-building, emphasis on togetherness, not joining in the between town teasing.
we had a theft, and a huge convention, and a semi-miraculous return of the stolen item, after tears, lectures, threats, tears, police, worries about honor and reputation, promises that a thing stolen from a moroccan would have had the same reaction, and finally... we got it back. thank God!
and then the kids left. and some of them cried to leave. whether they were sad to leave us, or their new girlfriend, or something else... at least they had a good time! i pray they learned something too.