It was the last afternoon of camp, and we were playing a huge game of “Capture the Flag,” campers against counselors. One caveat to being a member of the counselor team was that you had to put aside your competitive tendencies for 45 minutes and inevitably lose the game, preferably in style.
To add a bit of context: This game occurred at Camp Addis, a sports and arts camp for orphans in Ethiopia where I worked for six weeks this summer. For the first four weeks, I worked at a residential camp with six- to nine-year-olds. The final two weeks, I worked at different camps, one week with 13- to 17-year-olds and the other week with 10- to 13-year-olds.
At the camps, I was responsible for directing the sports programs. This job required that I come up with sports and games for upwards of 72 campers who did not speak any English.
But back to the story: Since it was the fourth and final game of the day, I called all the counselors in for a meeting. We wanted to rig the game to let one of the more timid campers have a chance to be the hero and free her entire team from jail. This strategy involved a complicated mix of trying hard enough to capture the majority of the campers, but not so hard that the counselors won the game.
After a few minutes of play, we had managed to put five campers in jail -— about halfway toward our desired total.
At that moment, one of the youngest campers, a 13-year-old girl whom I’ll call “Selam,” ran up the left side of the field. Since Selam had already had her share of glory that day, I decided it was best to pull her flag and send her to the jail. Unfortunately, I took too sharp of an angle, and Selam ran by me en route to happily freeing her entire team.
Following the play, my friend Ben, the only other American on my team, looked at me incredulously and said, “Zach, that wasn’t part of the plan.”
With a slight look of embarrassment, I responded, “Sorry, I tried to catch her. She just got away.” Ben shot back, “You let a 13-year-old girl run by you.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, she was fast,” I said.
This story was but one of many adventures I had while working at Camp Addis. Over the six-week span, I helped organize more than 20 different sporting activities for the campers. These games ranged from the obvious (soccer) to the completely foreign (lacrosse).
In many ways, working at Camp Addis was a crash course in how to create sporting events with the materials you might find in your garage. For a basketball hoop, we cut the bottom off a circular laundry basket and made a backboard out of a cardboard box.
To make lacrosse sticks, we cut water bottles in half and made handles out of broken branches.
Then to make things more exciting, we dressed up one of the counselors in a laundry-basket helmet and orange-cone kneepads, and we gave him a broom for a stick to play goalie.
Another time, I helped set up a game of “water pong” for the camp carnival. For that, I filled a variety of paint bowls and cans with water, gave the campers some ping-pong balls and watched to see what transpired.
It was stunning to see how, even halfway across the globe from Princeton, the simple action of throwing ping-pong balls into a cup could get people so fired up. At one point during the game, I had to tell one of the counselors — who was upset that a camper had prematurely blocked his shot — to tone the competitiveness down a notch.
Perhaps my favorite moment of the summer was during the last day of the camp, the day when I organized a camp-wide “olympics” competition.
The “olympics” was an opportunity for the campers to play all the sports they had participated in during the summer in one morning. For completing a positive task, like scoring a goal in soccer, the campers received a predetermined number of points.
In a 90-minute span, 72 campers shot a basket, scored a goal, threw a ball at a target and hit a volleyball over a net, all in hopes of accumulating enough points to defeat “Camp Tanzania,” a mythical camp that had participated in the set of events one month earlier.
That day at lunch, I made a camp-wide announcement to tell the campers whether or not they had beaten Camp Tanzania.
Of course, the campers won by a slim margin, and while I’m not sure they understood a word I was saying, I can’t remember ever being around a more excited and loud group of children in my life.
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