Yeah, I’m in it, ain’t no need to seek it
I am content, dream like content
So unconscious, just me and my conscience
I’m running with them wild things
Lookin' to do wild things
"Symphonies" - Dan Black ft. Kid Cudi
Stomp Stomp Clap - Stomp Stomp Clap - Stomp Stomp Clap - Stomp Stomp Clap.
“Win-Ning, Win-Ning Boyz! Stomp Clap - Stomp Stomp Clap
Win-Ning, Win-Ning Boyz! Stomp Clap - Stomp Stomp Clap
Win-Ning, Win-Ning Boyz!” Stomp Clap - Stomp Stomp Clap
We aren’t Queen, and I’m no Freddie Mercury, but on the center court of the VTC Mpanda School basketball court, standing atop the stolen trademark of the Chicago Bulls logo, The Winning Boyz and I are letting every one at camp know who we are, set to the tune of the famous “We Will Rock You” melody.
On the final chant of “Boyz” (the Z is integral to our name), I raise my hands over my head and on the final clap, I shoot my hands out to my sides in a 6’5” T formation. On cue, the boys follow their conductor/coach/group leader and assume total silence. This is where things go a bit off the rails. I didn’t fully agree to this part of things, but they wanted it, so I start to lean back anyways, with my hands out in front me, miming a high-handle bar motorcycle. I grip the throttle of my imaginary chopper and, with a twist of my right wrist, I start firing up the engine. “Vrooom vrum vrum vrooooom blubblubblubblub vrooooooom!!”
The boys are ecstatic - I can see their eyes light up in anticipation. This is their favorite part of the chant, as it was specifically requested by them. They all ride their highly expensive status symbol imaginary motorcycles, revving their bikes at as high an RPM as their teenage voices can manage. After living in their own little world for the 8 seconds or so, we transition to the next sequence. At the eighth second, I raise my right leg slowly, then power it to the ground in a commanding stomp. Again, the boys know the cue and cut their engines altogether. Total silence falls on the court. The rest of camp is watching to see where this odd parade of non-sequiturs will lead them next. Little do they know that now its my turn to shine.
I take a deep breath and get ready to bellow as loud as I possibly can, deep and loud - even though I know it will rack my body like a bullfrog looking for a mate.
“WINNING BOYZ?”
I feel my vocal chords vibrating and straining as I scream with all my energy. The boys, in unison, shoot their right fists fervently into the air, and fire back in their distinct African accents.
“WE ARE HE-YA!”
I heard them, but I didn’t really hear them, as I put my hand up to my ear and torque my head aside to indicate my displeasure. Another deep breath.
“I SAID! WINNING BOYZ!?!”
The hands shoot into the air once more and they meet my demand for more volume.
“WE ARE HE-YA!!!”
Now I’m feeling the juice, drunk with the chant-power. I start jumping. My legs are together, stiff as boards and I’m hopping up and down nodding my head with my eyes wired like a mad-man. The boys catch the hype and start hopping along, eyes wide and unblinking. At this point I’m less bellowing than I am just all out screaming.
“I SAID WINNING BOYZ!!!!!!”
“WE ARE HE-YAAAAA!!!!”
I come down for the soft landing, as it’s time to proceed with the chant since my team has matched my borderline apoplectic energy. We fall silent again as I begin to lean over my knees.
With both hands I slap both thighs with a precise and quick One-Two-Three count. The boys respond: One-Two-Three, with the sharp sound of hands hitting thighs. Then I stand up straight, puffing out my chest like a WWE wrestler and beat my chest with both hands in the same One-Two-Three cadence. The boys mimic me. One-Two-Three, the deep sound of chest beats echoes across the court.
Then together we put the cherry on the cake. Together we crescendo our voices - “aaaaaaAAAAHHHHH HOO!” And with the last grunt we shoot our faces into our arms in what is colloquially known as a “Dab” to the kids these days - made popular by American rappers and carried on by teenage boys in Africa.
The chant is done. The Winning Boys have spoken to all the members of the Boys Excelling Camp, outside of the town of Muhanga, Rwanda. We are seen. We are heard. We are he-ya.
Be Excellent and Glow Girls Glow
The Boys Excelling (BE) Camp is one of the two youth camps led entirely by Peace Corps volunteers in Rwanda. There is one camp for boys, which is BE camp, and one camp for girls, called the Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) camp. The camps are designed for Rwandan secondary schoolers, which means teenagers and young adults in their low 20’s, and each one lasts for about a week each - they offer campers a number of lessons about health, sexual health, finances, along with a heavy dose of sports and entertainment events.
In most years the two camps are staggered, with GLOW camp happening in August, and BE camp happening in December. The schedule this year, however, was disrupted because of the Rwandan presidential election that happened in August. Due to scheduling and financial constraints, the two camps were put on by the Peace Corps volunteers of the Southern Province of Rwanda in back to back weeks. For the volunteers of my cohort, Health 9, the camps started directly after our mandatory two week In Service Training that ended on December 1st.
So many of my colleagues, having signed up to do both camps, packed one month’s worth of clothes and sundries and went directly from a two week training to two weeks of camp. I, on the other hand, being an old man trapped in a young man’s body, could not abide this chunk of time away from home. I elected to go home for GLOW week, save my energies, and help my fellow males at BE camp with a full tank of gas. The stories I heard from my friends at GLOW camp, however, quickly made me regret my decision. While I spent the week grinding through health center reports to account for a staggering additional 100 children added to our malnutrition programs, my buddies were laughing, playing, and crying tears of wistful joy with what seemed to be an extraordinary group of young women. I begrudgingly ate crow, bided my weary time in my lonesome house, and looked forward to having my turn. I was told I was going to have to bring everything I had to execute my job of “Family Group Leader”. At the time I had no real conception of what this was. I was soon to find out.
Take the Lead
With a blink, I found myself on day one of camp, standing alone in front of a classroom full of my new group. At this point we had no relation to each other save for the fact that the 25 of us had been arbitrarily placed together and were now collectively referred to under the presumptuous and heavy title of “Family” - this, despite the fact that we didn’t yet know each other’s names. A few ice breakers from my Education volunteer and fellow leader Zach helped to get the boys warmed up just a little bit. But afterwards, it was our charge to select a team name, make a cheer and design a banner - all within the hour time block that we had.
We started fielding suggestions, which I naively believed would be an easy task. Then I remembered the natural silence of Rwandans, and then I saw the nervousness of young guys who are thrown into a new environment with new people, and finally I remembered that had I been in the same situation as them, armageddon would have to occur to make a single word come out of my mouth. Silence over took the room for minutes, while I stood at the board, chalk in hand, and smiling weakly to maintain the “fun collaborative” mood. Mercifully the first suggestion came in, cutting the silence.
“The Great Boys!”. Some nods went around the room. “The Excellent Boys!” another piped up. Even more assenting nods. I wrote them down with the squeaking chalk. “The Smart Boys!”. With the third “Boys” suggestion, I paused my writing hand, seeing that we were beginning to lock ourselves into a pattern. “I think that, these are great names!”, I said in my slowed down and well annunciated English, so that everyone could understand my apparently incomprehensible American accent. “What about other names…not with Boys? It could be anything, maybe like… The Presidents!” Stares. More silence.
“The Winning Boys!” One said. This was the most popular one yet. I was overruled. Maybe Donald Trump has watered down the mystique of the position, but I was at least banking on their love for President Paul Kagame to push my suggestion over the top. But, alas, I was the Family Group Leader, not a dictator. My group chose their name and it was my job to go with it. Next was coming up with the cheer. One of the Senior Facilitators named Elssa - a Rwandan former camper who has now returned to camp in a leadership role and liaison between staff and campers - came forward and, on the fly, came up with the majority of the cheer that made it into the final routine. Zach came up with the Queen inspired intro which wasn’t recognized readily by the boys, unfamiliar as they are with British 80’s rock-pop, but they were good sports and adopted it anyway. The chant was mostly done but the prevailing feeling was that it was a bit thin and short. We needed more ideas, more flourishes. We went back to open the floor to suggestions. After some time, a boy raised his hand and was already getting out of his seat to rush to the front of the room when I called on him. An imaginary motorcycle and some high RPM revving later, the infamous Chopper portion of our cheer was born.
The flurry of chant ideas passed me by and left me without my own unique mark on the one thing that defined my job. I eventually resolved that I would be best served not as the idea guy, but as the exclusive chant leader and straight up hype guy. I figured that if my big frame and big voice are good for anything, it is shouting maniacally at a bunch of people who are smaller than I am. It felt right to me, if nothing else.
This was my job at camp. Family Group Leader meant going with the boys to all the sports and competition events, getting them together, making sure they understood what was going on, and getting them excited. The role can best be described as Coach-meets-Facilitator. There were four family groups, each with a Family Group Leader volunteer. The four of us had our distinct styles - some liked to sing with their group, some liked to dance and get closely involved. My style became known to my friends and camp counselors as the “military style soccer dad”, as I managed to earn the respect of the boys with my ever-serious demeanor and loud, decisive chant leading - while keeping a fair distance that allowed them to have their own fun.
The Family Group Leader was just one of the roles that each Family Group had during camp. Each group had a Facilitator, which was Zach in my group, who was responsible for teaching lessons during the morning and early afternoons, and Senior and Junior Facilitators who were Rwandan liaisons. When we were planning for camp, I was entirely unaware of the roles and what they entailed, though I was told that I was perfectly cut out to be a Family Group Leader. When camp started, I could see why this was the case. The lessons that the Facilitators teach range from basic skills like budgeting, to more personal topics like issues surrounding gender roles and sex.
Reservations / Revelations
Starting camp, I was glad to have avoided the job of teaching lessons like these. Not because I disagree with the content, but because I view the English-Kinyarwanda language barrier as so daunting that I would find it difficult to convey many of the esoteric concepts through it. While we conducted the camp in English, the language capabilities of the campers was entirely varied. Some you could speak to in almost American speed English and slang, with no problems. With others, you would have to slow your speech down to a snail’s pace and annunciate comically in order to be understood - and even then, when you asked if they comprehended what you said, you may be met with a blank stare and meekly said “Yes…”.
In this vein, BE Camp offered an interesting test case in cultural blending. When you get to Peace Corps you receive a crash course in cultural sensitivity and understanding - mainly because you have to adopt certain practices of the local culture if you wish to live alone and harmoniously in a rural village. We are strongly encouraged at every turn to consider and respect Rwandan culture, and that no one culture is superior to any other, but is just different. But at BE Camp, with the American volunteers now controlling the show, from planning to item procurement to final implementation - the result, unsurprisingly, is a distinctly American style curriculum, underpinned by undeniably Western philosophy.
A benign but useful example of this was when we were coming up with our chants, and Zach and I were fielding ideas from the group. From as far as I have been able to tell in Rwandan culture, most institutions take a top-down approach where the leader makes decisions, no one questions him/her on any level, and doesn’t offer their own ideas unless they have been charged with doing so. The fact that Zach and I went into that classroom with the unquestioned preconception that the students should be driving the flow of ideas in an open forum shows how deeply we bring our own cultural understandings to bear in our everyday dealings. It presupposes that a collaborative dynamic is best, that each student has inherent creative rights, and that everyone’s opinion has equal heft. Do I believe these things? Absolutely. Have I ever seen any Rwandan meeting operate in this manner? Not once, yet. And so we were met with nervous stares, which forced us to really tap-dance and pry answers out of our campers. Eventually things took off, as our colorful chant reflected. But it was not without its difficulties.
Re-enter the BE Camp curriculum. When it came to teaching the lessons, it seemed to me that there needed to be slightly more of a delicate balancing act undertaken when considering the possible cultural friction between our advanced Western ideals and the Rwandan culture. In a camp when most statements and instructions had to be siphoned through a teenage translator, how accurately could we really convey the lessons that we wished would enhance the campers lives? Considering there is no direct Kinyarwanda word for “fun” or “jokes”, and that the word “Triangle” translates directly into “that shape with three sides” - how could we reasonably expect to convey ideas of gender identity and positive masculinity with the nuance and precision necessary? How could we even find out how useful the campers were finding the lessons, considering many spoke little English and come from villages in the countryside?
At first, during breaks and lunch, I would ask the campers how they felt about the lessons, and my suspicions were confirmed as many of them seemed non-plussed or did not seem to retain them at all. But as the week wore on, I found that their silence was borne of nervousness rather than incomprehension. Meal by meal and day by day, the campers began to open up, and commenced with showering me with questions about what they had been learning over the course of the week. The ones with poor English took great pains to work around their lack of language to convey their questions, and I summoned all my patience and focus to be able to help them. They wanted to be able to understand everything, and were not afraid to ask the questions to reach that understanding. The enthusiasm of the campers slowly revealed itself. They were greatly enjoying the camp, and I found my enjoyment growing as well.
The atom bomb to my cynicism came in the form of the “Affirmations”. During the week each camper and volunteer had a manilla envelope taped to the wall of the main hall meeting room, and campers were asked to write friendly notes to their friends and camp counselors. I held firm throughout the week that boys in their late teens would have no interest in writing little notes to each other. I imagined my 19 year old self being faced with this prospect, if I were a camper - an overly kind person bending over with their hands on their knees, their head and neck locked into a cheerful, non-threatening shrug: “Hey Alex, hey there pal! Do you want to write some notesss? Some nice notesss for your new best buddies here at camp? Just to tell them how you’re feeling? What do ya say champ? Well I think that would just be swell, don't youuuu?” I would have had an absolute conniption.
But again I was proven completely wrong. Following meals and during free time, I would find them taking the papers and writing vigorously, scouring the envelopes for their friends and counselors, and gleefully dropping their notes in. On the final day of camp, before we departed we took our envelopes off the wall and looked through them. I didn’t expect to get too much, but I was delighted to find handfuls of warm notes from my campers. It was an unnecessary but great touch to the camp, and yet another instance where I had to admit that my cynicisms would have served only as a impediment to my own enjoyment. I keep my folder here on my table in my house and look through it often with a smile. I couldn’t be happier to have them.
Camp ended seemingly as quickly as it started. The final day was filled with grinning pictures and an eager exchanging of information from the campers. My WhatsApp chat threads and Facebook Messages are now peppered with questions from campers, asking me anything from where I live and work, to what the English word is for the action of pulling a blanket on to your body. “I’m not sure,” I responded, “Just ‘covering’ yourself in a blanket? Wrapping?”. The question startled me because it seemed to imply that there is a specific Kinyarwanda equivalent for the word, which would be a additional indicator of how deep the language is (there is probably specific verb for the action, and I’m not joking) and how much of it I just do not know.
Regardless, I’m happy to answer their questions. (I’m not always as excited to answer their short and unnecessary phone calls at all hours of the day - Jones! How are you? I’m good. Ehhh, oookehhh. Ok bye now, Habimana.) Over the course of camp I was lucky to have connected with many of the boys. Camp was a fun experience, and another example of Rwanda slowly prying the unnecessary negativity and surliness out of me, a process which I am glad to have happen.
It was a cool example of what I think the essence of Peace Corps service is about. Building a bond not with everyone but a few people and moving forward from there. It is not clear whether or not camp will happen next year, because of budgetary and grant restraints, but if this was indeed the final one to happen in Rwanda then I was very glad to have been a part of it. But, if I have learned anything about our resourcefulness and ambition, something tells me that volunteers will find a way to make it happen next year.