For two weeks after school ended, I led an English camp. I invited pupils from the other schools in the city, and several Americans to help me on the different days.
I met a student, Julie, on the second day. She was enthusiastic, outspoken and precise. If I passed out papers and was waiting for everyone to stop buzzing so I could explain the activity, she was quick to point out that they didn’t understand what we were going to do.
We played Red Rover-Red Rover, Red Light Green Light, Mother May I, Charades, Hangman, relays and enacted a scavenger hunt.
I developed a camp plan that I followed both years. The second year, I invited more teachers to be involved. I taught the song, “Do your ears hang low,” one verse a day, because it turned out there were like eight verses to that song. Those ears hang low, high, wide, and come right off, and then we move on to tongue, nose, and eyes popping out. I didn’t realize that until I downloaded the song off iTunes and the thing kept going on and on.
I implemented three new English words a day. I taught them three words that I thought we’d be using that day like bounce, brain, sky-dive, round, and touch. We practiced spelling the words and listening for the wordsd. If they heard me or the other teachers say the words during the camp, they could shout out and I’d throw them candy. This worked great for about 30 minutes until we were immersed in another activity and forgot all about it.
I gave them a daily mind game/brain teaser. “I’m going to Grandpa’s house and I want to bring a… gorilla.” Another teacher said, “I’m going to Grandpa’s house and I want to bring a rabbit.” Then, “I’m going to grandpa’s house and I want to bring an apple. There was a pattern to the things you wanted to bring; in this case, the items brought must begin with the letters of the word “Grandpa.” The children were asked to bring something and if they couldn’t figure out the pattern, I said, “Sorry, you can’t bring that” until they figured it out. I played other such pattern games with them and after the first time, they started to get the hang of it.
We also played indoor and outdoor games and my friends Katy and Peter came for a couple days the second summer. They both had creative ideas and were able to jump in when needed.
We played a great station game where the children had to go to different stations, manned by a teacher, and perform a task to get a clue.
Katy and Peter stayed in my apartment. Peter had a miraculous habit of discovering things for me. He walked in the first day he arrived and looked up at the rafters above my hall cabinet, and said, “Interesting that there’s a knife up here. That where you normally keep it?”
This is the knife I'd been looking for for months.
Later, Peter said, “Hey, could I use this pad for my floor bed?” about a thin rolled mattress that was stored in an open ceiling compartment in the hallway that I may or may not have been aware of. Those tall guys, they notice things.
Friday morning before I got out of bed, I could hear Peter in the kitchen trying to use my lighter on the stove and I thought he might be having problem so I stumbled out of bed and then I saw the right front burner merrily lit up under a kettle of water and I said to Peter, “Interesting because I’ve never used that burner seeing as how my landlady said only the burners on the left work.”
***
My friend Michelle, who had lived in the village with me, did a two-week summer camp and invited volunteers to help her. I got my first glimpse of the mountains and it made me very, very happy to know that places like this existed in Ukraine. Antonella, Michelle and I traveled from Kiev together to Michelle’s village. It was a 14-hour journey.
We had three end seats on the aisle and we were in a car with about 1,000 children on their way to summer camp in the mountains. Which meant that they moved up and down the aisles, giggled and talked until the lights turned off at 10 p.m., then were up again at 3 a.m. when the lights turned back on. Why the heck the lights turned on at 3 a.m., I had no idea. I slept in my narrow bed off the aisle, second bunk, so narrow that I couldn’t roll over without falling off. And I woke up every five minutes. It was possible they were laughing at me because there were instances of me waking up to find my butt hanging out into the aisle, or my head leaning off the bunk with my mouth open. The children got off the train at 5 a.m. and it was finally silent.
Michelle’s village was beautiful and friendly. She had a large house with two floors and three bedrooms. She invited so many volunteers that at one point, two people slept in her room; two were on the living room futon, two volunteers were on each of the two beds on the second floor, the guys were on mattresses in an empty storage room and she and Antonella were sleeping in the hayloft.
We made homemade bread and corn bread and pizza and macaroni salad and 20 eggs’ worth of scrambled eggs and scratched our heads daily to think of meals to prepare.
At camp we played games for three hours with the children; kickball and capture the flag and Frisbee and “Human Knot.” Then we swam in the river if time permitted. Kickball was always amusing. The children didn’t understand the rules. They hung around on base when they should be running, while all their teammates shouted at them, or they took off at a dead run for the wrong base because they had no idea what was going on.
Every day, we were invited by Michelle’s neighbors somewhere for lunch, or to milk a cow, or for tea and cake, or on picnics, or to go mushroom hunting.
Michelle said that this was how her life was on a normal basis and the rest of us wondered how she did it. We had so many invitations coming in that it was like the president had come to town.
I stopped off to visit my village host family for a few days that summer. They invited me to go camping by the Desna river. Sestra and her cousin didn’t want to go so it was all the adults.
We left the village at 6:30 p.m. or so. Drove 10 minutes, then stopped by a field. My host mom stayed in the car. My host dad grabbed a bucket and told me to come with him. “Take a stick,” he said, or something to that effect. He said words and picked up a stick and I got the picture. He pushed aside dead brush on the ground and dug into the dirt. He began plucking worms from the ground and tossing them into the bucket.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “This is what we are doing?” Using two sticks, I helped.
My contributions consisted of lots of clods of dirt until he looked at the bucket and said, “The dirt is not needed, only the worms.”
“But I can’t just pick up the worms,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I don’t want to touch them,” I said.
He smiled. “Use the sticks then but dirt is not needed.”
We drove to the city and picked up his sister and husband from the train station. Then drove to the river.
The men set up tents and built a fire, and the women prepared vegetables, sausage and potatoes with pieces of salo (pig fat) in the middle. My host dad's sister learned about my involvement in the collection of the worms and laughed when I described it.
“You were his slave,” she giggled. I mostly stood around, at a loss as to how to help. We drank beer and vodka and in my head, I toasted America’s Independence Day. Just before we went to bed, it started to rain. On the second day, it rained to mid-afternoon. The men set up fishing poles on the river. My host dad propped up four fishing rods sticking out of pieces of pipe in the ground along the shore. Each line had a bell on it that would ring if the line was pulled on. Then he sat in his chair on the shore and ate sunflower seeds.
The men built another fire under a big table umbrella they had brought. My host mom roasted Shashliki (shish kabobs) and potatoes. We ate in the rain. We adjourned to the van to talk. Well, I listened. I did a lot of listening. Then we went back to sleep because there was nothing to do. Mostly, we did a lot of sleeping and eating because of the rain.
We swam a little on the afternoon of the third day before heading back to the village.
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