Although Rotary has kept us busy so far in Tokyo, there's also been a lot of down time spent alone in the evenings because, quite frankly, we're all too exhausted to do anything else.  While I was cleaning the tiny apartment that I'm currently subletting, I turned on the Portuguese playlist from camp and a rush of intense memories came flooding back.



Though it was extremely challenging for many reasons, I'm glad that I had the chance to experience language and cultural immersion in one of the Concordia summer programs.  It was very hard to work consistently with small children, most of whom spoke little or no Portuguese, all day every day.  It was also difficult to work as a multicultural team in such intense, stressful and busy circumstances. My patience was pushed to its limits much more at camp than ever before compared with circumstances abroad.  I hated that I never had a minute to myself and that my time wasn't my own and it was exhausting to be a smiling extrovert all the time.  I remember one night I hid in the vacuum closet  in the staff lounge just so I could think straight and compose a few emails in peace.



But like during any other intense time, I grew a lot and learned even more.  I learned a lot about youth language programming, how to entertaining and manage groups and multicultural communication and group dynamics in general.  I got a lot of new ideas for language teaching especially in terms of games, activities, songs, dances and cultural experiences for the classroom.  It also surprised me how much all of the little silly routines and traditions meant to the campers and showed me how much even a week outside a child's comfort zone can have the possibility to impact him or her for life.  This was really exciting for me and gave me a lot of hope for the future.  Finally, it never ceased to amaze me how much the counselors meant to the campers - even though we had usually just met them a day or two before.  Campers clung to us, imitated us and constantly sought out our attention.  This fact, above anything else, constantly motivated us to speak Portuguese, have a positive attitude and be inclusive at all times.



My favorite thing that I learned about was the power of acting and theatre in language learning.  Though personally I didn't particularly enjoy playing a role in the soap opera and improv-ing in Portuguese, it was the favorite part of most students' experiences and they gleaned a lot of new language from it.  Every week we had a new soap opera written by our leader, Bruno, and based off of a popular show in Brazil.  Every night we'd act out a new episode in front of the campers as if we were appearing on television.  Bruno used a large paper TV remote control to rewind, fast forward, slow motion, mute etc. any scene that he wanted.  The remote controlled all of our (the actors) actions and speech on stage.  It was genius and it was incredibly successful.  He would frequently "Pause" the show to ask questions to the campers to check for understanding and get their opinions and predictions.  If they didn't understand, he'd "Rewind" and we'd play the scene again.  During the pause we (the actors on the TV) would freeze and hold our position until he would press "Play" again.  Essentially, we were Bruno's puppets and he creatively used the remote in comical ways all the time which always got laughs.



Interestingly, most of the campers were itching to either work the remote control themselves or act out a soap opera of their own.  We used this to our advantage at the end of the camp program and had them write and make their own video (it was hilarious and they had a great time). Acting in another language is something I never would have thought of or supported, but it was, by far, the most popular part of our programming for everyone involved.



In addition, working at Concordia gave me a different way to use and practice my own Portuguese.  I learned a lot of new words and had to use Portuguese in both planning classes and activities as well as carrying them out.  I spoke more Portuguese in six weeks than I did in months in Brazil because I wasn't teaching English or working with others who could speak English.  This was evidenced by my visit with Sean on the way home.  Sean's boss was gracious enough to give him the night and day off when I was passing through Wisconsin.  We got a hotel and when the alarm went off in the morning, I started shouting at Sean to get up and get moving so we could make it to breakfast before it closed.  I didn't realize that I was yammering away in Portuguese until Sean shook me and said, "English, babe, English. I have no idea what you're saying."  It had become so ingrained in me to be bossy in Portuguese that I didn't even realize what I was doing.



Finally, camp gave me some solid new friends.  Now, let me assure you that we weren't always the best of friends and had several conflicts because of some high-stress situations, but since we had to work closely together to plan the program, we had to constantly work through our differences and just get over it.  Since I lived, ate, worked and relaxed with the seven other Brazilians, we became really close and I know I'll be in touch with many of them for years to come.

In conclusion, camp - would I do it again? Nope.  Am I glad I did it? Yep.  Thanks for sharing the experience with me!

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