It’s one of the rituals of the summer camp experience: young campers starting each morning with a group song. But here at Al-Waha, it’s not the standard “Camptown Ladies” fare.
The kids warble not in English but in a guttural yet soothing Arabic, the language they’re learning in a two-week session on the shores of northwestern Minnesota’s Leek Lake.
As they sing, Al-Waha’s dean, Ghazi Abuhakema, translates: “My world is beautiful and wrongdoing will not happen. A villager I am. Our caravan keeps moving forward in a big long procession.”
Al-Waha has the usual summer camp activities, from rough-and-tumble sports matches to arts and crafts sessions. But here at the newest of Concordia College’s summer language camps, it’s all in Arabic, led by bilingual counselors from places like Egypt, Sudan and Lebanon teaching young, mostly American kids about Arabic language and culture.
Al-Waha, which translates to “oasis,” is Concordia’s 14th summer language camp, the latest in a renowned program that dates to 1961 and has drawn students from around the world to learn languages as disparate as German and Chinese, Finnish and Korean.
With 200 million Arabic speakers worldwide and more than 600,000 in the United States, officials at Concordia, located in nearby Moorhead, said it was a natural choice for their newest camp. But recent world events, they said, make the camp and its mission of fostering knowledge and understanding of Arabic language and culture all the more important.
“Our kids are meeting their counselors and seeing they’re young people just like them. They’re not terrorists, they’re not rich, they’re not driving around in the Mercedes,” said Abuhakema, who is Palestinian, and a professor of Arabic and international studies at Middlebury College in Vermont.
The counselors at Al-Waha know that two weeks is not enough time to turn a kid into a fluent speaker. It’s more about creating curiosity, sending kids home as ambassadors of a new culture and with the desire to know more about the Arabic world and its people.
The campers spend about 90 minutes a day in two intense language lessons. Much of the learning is about participation, with counselors leading the groups in skits and activities built around a chosen theme of the day, such as the importance of the family unit to Arabic culture.
From the moment campers arrive, all the scheduled activities are in Arabic. The rustic cabins are named after major cities in the Arab world, with signs in the right-to-left script of the language’s alphabet.
“They speak everything in Arabic,” said William Justin Chittams, a 16-year-old camper from Washington, D.C. “You have to figure out a lot of it from their hand movements and body language. You get better slowly, a little bit each day.”
This summer, Concordia is offering two two-week Arabic sessions, one for ages 8-14 and the second for ages 13-18. In all, 89 kids signed up, well surpassing the expected enrollment. Next summer, Concordia will also offer a four-week camp that will fulfill a year’s worth of high school language credit for attendees.
As they pique interest among young people about Arabic language and culture, camp officials are concerned they’re sending them back into an educational system that still has few opportunities for those who want to keep learning. Several Concordia officials said they hope they’re on the leading edge of an increase in Arabic instruction in U.S. high schools.
Such a trend would help to fill a growing need for Arabic skills in U.S. military and intelligence circles, in diplomatic and higher education settings and even in corporate America.
“I bet that the Pentagon and the CIA and the State Department are chomping at the bit for kids like these,” said Sheldon Green, a Concordia official. Funding for the Arabic village came in part from a $250,000 grant from a U.S. State Department “critical-needs” language program.
Some of the campers are already eyeing career paths that could benefit from Arabic skills. Still, the kids at Al-Waha aren’t spending that much time thinking about the future. Mostly, they seem to just be enjoying summer camp.
Sherin Mahrat, a 13-year-old Chicagoan, answered fast when asked about the best part of her camp experience.
“I made a lot of really good new friends,” Mahrat said. “I know I’m going to cry when it’s all over.”
