Camp Excel

Last month Heather and I organized a week long summer camp at my university. Ukrainians from all different parts of the community participated and volunteers came to help from all over the country.

This is the entrance to my university and, for this week, to Camp Excel.

Me and Ed are just inside registering people for the camp. It cost 15 hryvnia for the week (about $2). This is very inexpensive, even by Ukrainian standards. We wanted to keep the price low so that it wouldn't prevent anyone from participating. We did need a little money to serve tea and cookies every day (this is customary in Ukraine) and to buy some other supplies for the camp. Of course, the money was not for Peace Corps volunteers. Everyone who volunteered offered their time and paid for their own train tickets to come to Mykolayiv. I'm very grateful for their contributions.

This was a bit of a snag. They were painting the front of the building on the first day of the camp and the scaffolding is blocking the front door. We managed to get everyone in the building and have the camp but this made it slightly more complicated.

Day 1 was International Awareness day. On this day we focused on teaching the participants about prejudice, discrimination, and tolerance. In Ukraine there are few minorities and people are not always understanding of them. This discussion was helpful for better understanding of people of different cultures, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, etc.


We brainstormed common stereotypes for different groups with the students and talked about what it means when we classify people.


I was walking around town after the lesson and took pictures of some graffiti. It isn't unusual to see graffiti like this and I'm sad to admit that I hardly even notice it anymore.

I showed these pictures to the students the next day as an example of intolerance in their own community (people always think the problem is somewhere else).

Day 2 was Film Day which was a bit lighter and lots of fun. In this picture we are introducing them to different types of characters in film. Our friend Bennett is cross-dressing for a laugh.

The students made their own skits in groups that corresponded to different types of film genres. Brandon is accompanying this skit on his guitar.

In this skit Vika is a young woman enjoying a beautiful day and Roma is a vampire that will seduce and murder her.

Pavel provides the comic relief as the bumbling doctor.

Martin (the one in the bunny hat) led this day and he did a great job.

This is the green screen challenge. In this scene the stick will be a dragon after the cgi is added. and they are acting as if it were visible.

Now the students are improvising Foley Art, also known as sound effects for a film clip that is playing on the screen.

They had lots of fun with this and made lots of noise! It's a good thing there were no other classes going on!

At the end of the day we made pinatas. Of course, we had to explain to them what a pinata is and what you do with one, but they were totally into it!

This is my counterpart, Andriy. I started making this pinata and he finished it. He intended to make a baby monkey, but he couldn't find the colors he wanted. Instead he left the majority unpainted including the name tag I had put on it the previous day so I would know it was mine. He seemed to think it was an easy transition from a baby monkey to baby David so that's what he called it. I decided to consider it an honor that he created an idol in my image.

Here are some of the other pinatas. You might agree with me that many of them ended up looking a bit like their creators.





Most people made animals or faces, but not Pavel. He made a bomb. Iea is lighting it for him and after that, watch out!

The next day was environmental day. Heather is leading an activity called the "web of life" showing the participants how all life in an ecosystem is interdependent.

Next we put the students in charge of making environmental projects and teaching each other about their topics. I'm showing them my example on invasive species.



This group got a little carried away, but I'm sure after this presentation no one will be littering. You can see a clean happy world on the left followed by pollution to the right and, finally, something that looks like the apocalypse below. Yikes!

After this we did a recycled sports activity. The students created sports and games using only recycled materials. This is recycled bowling!


and recycled tennis.

A few days earlier I took pictures of a nearby park that was littered with garbage. Unfortunately this is all to common in Ukraine. People just throw their trash on the ground and no one picks trash up. What could really be a beautiful park was in reality just gross and disgusting. I showed the students these slides in the hopes of motivating them to participate in a clean up.




A trash pick up is usually viewed by students as some type of punishment, cleaning up parks or beaches is not part of their culture. We tried to show them it could be a positive thing by turning it into a game.



This guy is Sasha. He was just biking by and stopped to ask if he could help us. We said of course! He really made our day, we didn't expect anyone to stop and help at all.





Finally, we took pictures of the park after we cleaned it up. The next day we showed the students the before and after pictures. The difference was dramatic and everyone felt really proud.







The prize for the group that picked up the most trash was that the counselors would write a song about them. The volunteers were great and wrote two songs. One for the winners and one for everyone who participated. This picture is of Heather singing Y'all picked up the trash, set to the tune of I've been everywhere. The kids loved it!


The forth day was Music & Drama. For a warm up the participants are making words with their bodies. See if you can figure this one out!

And this one!

In the next activity, groups made household things out of them selves. Bennett is the television, Heather is the TV program, and Martin is the antenna.

This one was particularly funny. Their object was a guitar.

Later we had them make more skits with interesting props.

They had fun.

Next, we played a game called The Raven. The girl who is sitting is blindfolded. The other participants must silently sneak up and try to take the keys that are sitting in front of her. If she hears them she can point at them and they're out. Lots of fun!

After the warm up activities we had them make their own musical instruments out of recycled materials.

They definitely got into it!


When they were finished we had a music circle with all our new instruments.


Musical chairs. The students loved these games because they had never played them before. As a bonus, Brandon provided the music with his guitar and Heather with her harmonica.






For the blanket drop game we had two teams. Each team had to pick a person to go to their side of the blanket. Then we dropped the blanket and the first person to say the opponent's name won and increased their teams' numbers by capturing the loser. Another fun activity between the main ones.

Martin sang his song a second time to congratulate the winners of the trash pick up since some of them arrived late.


Group pinata picture!


The next day was Healthy Lifestyles day. Brandon is writing some new vocabulary on the board. These are words they will need to know to follow the instructions for yoga, which is the next activity.

To practice the vocabulary we played "people to people." They had to follow instructions by touching body parts like "knee to thigh" as pictured above.

With their newly learned vocabulary they could follow the instructions for yoga.



After yoga it was time for HIV/AIDS education. HIV/AIDS is a big problem in this country. Ukraine has the fastest growing rate of HIV infection in Europe. In this picture the students are trying to decide how HIV can and cannot be transmitted.

This was followed by class discussion.

This group is talking about the prevalence of different types of transmission in Ukraine. Sharing needles, unprotected sex, mother to child, etc.



Healthy lifestyles was the last day. Everyone had so much fun that they didn't want to leave. Students hung out for an hour or two after we finished to get pictures and movies of the camp and to chat with the volunteers one last time before they said goodbye. The event was a huge success and I consider it to be one of the highlights of my service.