Camp ACCESS

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Much like the past month, this past week was spent away from the hospital in which I work and from gardening. Six other Volunteers and I assisted with a summer camp at 3 different high schools around Dakar. Some of you may remember from my posts last year that I participated then as well.

The camp was part of the ACCESS Program, a U.S. Embassy funded program to better equip high school students with English. In addition to attending English classes in school, the participants take an additional 6 hours of English each week through the ACCESS Program over the course of two years.

While this program is relatively new here in Senegal, the coordinators of the program have set up a summer camp each summer in which Peace Corps Volunteers have led the activities. One of the reasons for this is due to the importance of learners of English to be able to be surrounded by native English speakers. While their teachers have near flawless English, they are Senegalese themselves.

For this camp, I worked at Lycee Thioroye with two other Volunteers. For the week, we had about 45 kids, well, not really kids, they ranged in age from 18 to 21. We managed to luck out all week with no rain. We went day by day as what to do and became very flexible the more we got a feel of the situation. For the first part of the week, our activities centered around team building, leadership, and physical activity. Slowly, as the kids became more comfortable around us and even each other, we started more discussion based activities.

As I think I said last year, hearing these kids talk about issues facing them as young people and as Senegalese was incredible as well as their eagerness to learn more about the United States. For me and the other Volunteers it was moving.

These kids are Senegal’s future and have a strong desire to make it a positive one. Americans back home should be proud about programs like this. Their ability to speak English was very good and encouraging to their personal and national progress.