Spinning Molly

“It doesn’t matter how many pictures you look at or even how many video clips you watch,” Molly says, “nothing comes close to the first-hand experience of seeing those little rugrats stampeding the bus, chanting “wazungus” in complete unison as we rolled into school the first day.”

A swirl of noise and wind surrounded our circle of kids during the morning songs on the first day of camp. The first school we visited for the second summer session of World Camp was a primary school composed of 5 brick buildings and a few hundred kids in the village of Mitundu. We screamed out songs over roaring bulldozers paving a new road next to the school and a sea of surrounding rugrats (our affectionate name for the kids who play around the school, but aren’t old enough to attend). Somehow, Molly, Brittanny and I managed to get all of the school kids spinning and cheering about bananas in the middle of the circle.

Molly, a tall, energetic brunette who likes to refer to herself as the token Jew on the volunteer staff, recently graduated from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and decided to volunteer before finding a permanent job. “I had been looking at a variety of different programs all around the world. I would look at them, bookmark them, and then never apply. When I found World Camp I had applied and was talking to Jesse (the program director) within 20 minutes,” she says.

Although our four day program at Mitundu went by in a whirl, Molly bonded with her students and is already teary eyed about having to leave them. “I think that it took two solid days before I knew my students on a personal level,” she says. “I guess on the first day I never foresaw the relationships that I had made with the students just two days later.”
The four day camp session includes sections on HIV/AIDS education, environmental education and gender equality. Each day is broken up into different sections of each, emphasizing hands on activities and group work. On the first day, the kids pretended to be T-cells and had to defend their classroom for a cold at the door, only to be killed off by the HIV virus.

To get the kids thinking about alternative sources of energy, we did an exercise on wind energy where they got to make their own pinwheel. “We took the kids outside to try their pinwheels. At first, they were working but the pins would come out,” Molly says. The kids kept running back to her and her teaching partner, Paige, and their Chichewa field staff, Segas. “Then they got a glimpse of these two boys on a dune by our classroom. All you could see were their pinwheels really spinning. It was quintessential pinwheel spinning; it could’ve been a commercial for pinwheels,” she laughed. “Once the class caught glimpse of that we all raced out to dunes and just stood on top of the dune to watch our pinwheels spin.”

Although she’ll miss her class at Mitundu, she did exchange numbers with them. “If I’m ever back, we’ll have some nsima together,” Molly says.

post submitted by B. Mole