4/1/10 Sprinks' Camp

While a successful Spring Camp experience requires many things, from competent staff to friendly kids to tasty food, in my experience it hinges on having a great group of PCVs. If you love the Volunteers you’re working with, you can weather nearly anything. If there’s drama, tension, resentment, or any other negative emotion, everything becomes harder.

Al-humdulillah, we have an awesome group of Volunteers working here in Emerald City. Awesome.

And from here on out, I’m going to refer to us by the nicknames we gave each other.

Our fearless leader is Sprinks, shortened from Sprinkler, who famously sprayed an entire table and several friends with water after hearing the 10,000th joke of the day from our resident comedienne. That fabulous female is now Wudja, from her habit of posing brain-twisting “Would-you-rather” puzzlers, like “Would you rather run naked through your site for a full day, or spend a full week slapping on the butt everyone you greeted?” or “Would you rather battle a witch pilgrim or a zombie shark?”

My Environment partner-in-crime is now Zifi, truncated from Zombie Fish. See, we Volunteers tend to slip off and play cards from time to time, and one of our games of choice is E.R.S., also known as Double Jack Slap. (You know, the one where you slap doubles and sandwiches, and where face cards let you steal the pile.) If you run out of cards, you’re out – but you can slap your way back in, if your fingers are quick enough. Zifi got out early in one of our first rounds, and his outstretched palm, twitching and flopping and shuddering as it kept reaching out to slap the stack and then checking itself against illegal slaps, looked like a cross between a flopping fish-out-of-water and a shuddering zombie. Hence, Zombie Fish.

The only Volunteer working the camp who I hadn’t met before was RoRo. He’s the newest of the five of us, having only been in-country for about six months. Whence the nickname? Well, we were trying to decide what simple song to sing with the campers at the pre-dinner camp song spectacular (previous favorites include “Boom Chick-a Boom”, “Go, Go Banana” and "The Hokey-Pokey"). Somebody suggested “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” so we gave that a trial run. RoRo opened with an arpeggio. When, after three gentle (and not-so-gentle) reminders that all three Rows are supposed to be on the same note, we just accepted that (1) he’s tone deaf, and (2) he’ll be RoRo forever.

And my nickname? Well, between my penchant for playing the original “Big Yellow Taxi” (which I taught my kids, for its English vocabulary and environmental message), my habit of bursting into random snatches of song, and my general tree-hugging hippy behavior, it was decided that I’m an updated version of Ms. Joni Mitchell. And since I give back rubs to my fellow PCVs, and there’s no record that Joni Mitchell is a massager, I’ve been deemed an upgrade: Joni 2.0.

So without further ado, I’d like to introduce the American staff of Spring 2010’s Spring Camp in Ben Slimane: Sprinks, Wudja, Zifi, RoRo, and J2.