Second Report from the Intercultural Summer Camp

Report by Hassib Allakarami, Hymen Allakarami, Sooren Salahei and Garrett MullanIt’s day 5 of the camp and there is a lot of news to report since Wednesday morning.  On Wednesday after morning exercises, we had breakfast which was a bowl of cereal, toast, juice and tea/ coffee/ milk.  After breakfast, we had morning assembly where we found out about all the activities taking place that day.  We also passed message to secret friends. The children are very good secret friends.  Some of them send presents and other send kindly notes so as to ensure that their friend is happy at the camp.  After assembly group 1 (ages 11-13yrs) stayed in the hall and did team building games.  We played pass the chicken, a game with a bouncy ball, a sack race, a game where we were blind and had to follow the shepard.  Hymen Allakarami said: ‘these activities were really good fun’.  Group 2 went coasteering.  Group 2 could not travel as far as group 1 yesterday because the weather was bad, but we did jump off the pier lots more times than Group 1.After lunch we did the language learning and cultural activities including Indian dancing, Slovenian and Russian languages for two hours.  Then we went to the local GAA pitch and played Gaelic football. Some of the children had never played Gaelic before.  Hymen and Sooren are, however, experience Gaelic players and about the sport they say that is it is a good sport and really enjoyable.Then we had chicken and a choice of chips or mash potato for our dinner.  In the evening we had presentations of the countries of Belgium and the United States of America from our volunteers Ann, Leah and Samantha.  Later we had teams games and then feed back last thing in the evening to hear in small groups what everyone thought of that day’s activities. Thursday was another packed day with French, Irish and Spanish languages as well as learning of Slovenian songs and Indian dancing.  We played a game during the day called ‘clocks’.  Children had to make 12 appointments with their clock  and meet with eachother to discuss various topics for a few minutes each. We discussed, one to one with eachother.   We discussed our favourite films, books, travel and friendship.  Garrett Mullan learned from Zrorar that he had won an award in his school. The award was for being a ‘best friend’. Some of us played chasing in the dunes and that was lots of fun.  We also got a chance to go to the shop.In the evening, our hall became a theatre.  Our volunteers broke the camp into four groups to learn a fairytale legend and the purpose was that the group then had to perform the play to the whole camp.  We performed stories from Ireland, India, Russia and Slovenia.  It was great and we hope you like the pictures when we put them up. The camp leaders let us stay up til 10:30pm tonight because some of us asked for that because the days are so full of activities that there is not enough free time to just sit around and be in eachother’s rooms.On Friday, we did the afternoon activities in the morning because we couldn’t find the hall key.  We broke into two groups and walked in the hills and mountains of Ghleann Cholm Cille.  One of the groups walked nearly 4 miles to Ghleann Cholm Cille and after all that they went into the shop.  Paul brought us all back to the house on the bus. In the afternoon we did Russian dancing and singing.  We sang a song called Katyusha which is about love in war and another happy song called Kalinka. We all had great fun doing Russian dancing.  Some of the participants proved to be quite accomplished dancing just like they do in the films. Before we report to you again we are now looking forward and preparing for our show tonight. We have a Gaeltacht College of 55 students visiting to give a joint performance from both camps.  The Gaeltacht students will perform songs, dances from their colleage and our young people will be performing dances and songs learnt at our camp.   We hope you like our pictures and will be uploading more in our next report.  You can see some of the boys playing pool, girls doing break dancing girls and our volunteers Seanan from Ireland, Samantha from USA, Masha and Kate from Russia.