Hi everyone…
Looks like I am the first to recover from exhaustion to be here. =) I slept the whole afternoon away, and am quite fresh now.
I had a great time for the past two days. It passed all too soon, and my ‘ducks’ were just starting to get attached to me. SIGH. That’s how life goes. Hello’s and goodbyes are inevitable.
I arrived at the camp with a thousand expectations. Would this camp be successful? Would we be doing anything more than merely fulfilling the Language Camp course requirements?
I was pretty worked up about the whole thing.
The welcome to the school was glorious. We were shown to most comfortable sleeping quarters, and the hygiene of the toilets were better than many town schools. Good start to a great day I thought. And so it began.
I made myself useful immediately by helping out with the backdrop. I could see that they were badly behind schedule, and some had a err….’height’ problem sticking words on the board. Nonetheless, time constraint got the better of us and we had not enough time to stick up the entire backdrop. The words looked crammed because more lines were planned to be stuck on the board in the first place. Anyway, the rest of the opening ceremony seemed to have passed pretty smoothly. The kids didn’t seem to notice anything out of the usual about the backdrop and were busy singing away on the top of their lungs. Then came the part where I was given the honour of taking a bunch of little ‘ducks’ under my wings with two other facilitators. They were a bunch of shiny eyed, shy, and active kids. I immediately felt a certain ‘motherly responsibility’ over them, and in return, sensed devotion on their part. Drawing of logos and mottos were a fun activity. When given the marker and manilla card, the artistic kids immediately set to drawing a duck- the animal that showed the identity of the group. I had a time of my life trying to make them talk in English, but it all seemed very awkward and unnatural. They seemed to have spoken in nothing else but Bahasa Melayu for the past ten years of their lives. I couldn’t blame them. However, they managed to take control of the situation, and independently chose different items they wanted for the logo with good explanations (in B.M.) why they wanted those items. I did a good lot of translation on the way to help them. That was the only way they could get started. They were probably a little taken aback with my excitement and enthusiasm, but I was getting weary when they did not respond. I found out what the problem was several hours later.
The kids had a proficiency level of 1 out of the scale of 10 (well, most of them anyway). We were initially asked to conduct EVERYTHING in English with the hope that we could maximize their exposure to English. That was near impossible. They could hardly understand very simple phrases. To them, English was almost a foreign language. I was surprised to find that other group fascilitators seemed to have built a strong relationship with their team, until I noticed that everyone was talking almost 100% in Bahasa Melayu with them. NO WONDERLAH! I said. Knowing that it is not wrong or particularly negative as it was the only way to communicate and build interpersonal relationships with the kids, I started to code switch actively. That was when the fun actually started. My ducks actually started to talk to me, and tell me about their lives and started to be really really enthusiastic about the whole thing. However, English was used as much as possible although I repeated myself a great deal when using that language.
The first few games were quite monotonous. We did not know the level of the students and started off with very ambitious games. As a result, most of them looked like zombies. Mr. G came by with a bunch of tips that could help us get along better with the kids. Some of it worked like magic potion.
Oh dear, I have to get to the bathroom. URGENT nature call. Have to stop abruptly and will get back A.S.A.P. describing my experience in Air Manis. Gotta go!
BYE.