Boy oh boys

Spending last week in the woods with 86 teenage boys from cities and villages throughout Macedonia at boys camp (aka the Young Men's Leadership Project) turned out to be one of my favorite experiences here thus far. The boys represented the various ethnic groups from Macedonia but their shared enthusiasm, intelligence, and spirit united them into successful teams. Every day the boys had lessons on leadership, civil society, personal development, health, teamwork, and my class--outdoors. After class there were 4 hours of electives ranging from ultimate Frisbee to mosaics to hip hop. Anyone with any energy left after those 10 hours was free to play ping pong, watch a movie, or do origami.

Each team also got to spend a night camping outside with the West Kent YMCA from England that drove all the way to Macedonia just to help with camp. They brought archery equipment and the Americans taught everyone to make s'mores, which are apparently unique to the USA because nobody else had ever heard of them. The camp was truly an international collaboration with the Red Cross of Macedonia doing a workshop on how the boys could plan community volunteer projects, as well as teaching first aid and CPR.

I was an Outdoors instructor with fellow Peace Corps volunteers Jim and Natty. Jim spent his whole career in the military and taught outdoor survival there, so he was perfectly suited for our subject matter and Natty is from the wilds of Massachusetts and also well versed in outdoor survival. They developed lessons on fire-building and knot tying, map and compass reading, and edible plants and animals, while I wrote lessons on decomposition (using timelines to guess how long different items take to disintegrate) and the 3 R's (reducing, reusing, recycling) and plant and animal identification (plus a web of life exercise). I think the boys surprised themselves with how many ways they came up with to reuse a plastic bottle and there was more interest in the plant and animal scavenger hunt than I expected. The weather was less than ideal the first few days, i.e. pea soup fog and intermittent rain, but the boys hung in quite well and I felt like they really enjoyed our class. Pictures from camp are up on Picasa.

Camp closed with a mini Olympics and team skits, including a scathing yet hilarious parody of camp staff. I shared the sentiment of most of the boys that I didn't want camp to end--I was having too much fun playing forest battles (aka capture the flag in the woods), catching up with the other volunteers, and playing more games of Scattergories than I can count, not to mention being free of email and the internet for a week. Alas, it was destined to end but the group of boys from Bitola that Ashley and I have been mentoring seemed to take all the lessons to heart. They want to do a project in Bitola and start an American Sports Club for American football, baseball (the camp's home run derby champ is from Bitola!), etc. We are having a meeting this Friday so they can strategize.

Already the guys are asking me if I will extend my volunteer service and it is wonderful to have them saying that they don't want me to go. I am looking forward to helping them launch the sports club but truthfully I think that through the combination of what they learned at camp and their innate greatness, they could do it all by themselves.