I recently got back from my trip to Benin. My mom and I were there volunteering at the teen youth camp that my church holds over there, and we taught swimming, English, and baseball, and assisted instruction in volleyball and speech classes. This trip also marked a next step of progress in my nonprofit.

My mom and I both found teaching swimming to be very fulfilling and worthwhile. At the beginning, we had everyone attempt to swim from one side of the pool to the other, and only two campers could do it. We decided to try to teach the campers to float on their backs, thinking that we could then teach them to move their arms and swim on their backs once they learned to float. This proved to be quite challenging, and we eventually just began teaching them to swim face down using a basic freestyle stroke. This is where they started to make lots of progress. They seemed to pick it up unexpectedly easy. By the end of camp, everyone could swim across the width of the pool, and many could swim the entire length of the pool. This was incredible and unexpected progress, and my mom and I found it very encouraging. At the end of the camp, we held a swimming race, and the fastest swimmer earned the swimming diploma with a time of 14.6 seconds to swim the length of the pool.

In the English classes, we taught them basic conversations that one could use in everyday situations. One conversation was one in which someone was trying to find taxis to Cotonou, the capital of Benin. Another conversation was one in which someone was buying fish, and had to ask if the store took credit card or only cash. Some of the campers had already learned some English in school, but everyone made lots of progress in English. The director of the camp wanted us to do an assessment and present the best English student with a diploma, so I did the two conversations with each camper and my mom and Werner, the other staff member, graded each camper on their English in the conversation.

We also taught baseball. This was by far the most challenging activity to conduct. In west Africa, each ethnic group has their own specific language, and there are many ethnic groups, and thus many unique languages and dialects. Nigeria and Ghana all speak English as well as the specific languages, and Ivory Coast, Togo, and Benin all speak French along with their specific languages. This camp had campers from Ivory Coast, Togo, and Benin, and since French is the one language they all have in common, they all spoke French. This meant that I had to teach baseball in French. This was an extremely challenging task. We succeeded in teaching them baseball, but it took a while because it’s difficult to explain such a complicated game with such specific and detailed rules in my second language.

Finally, I made progress in my nonprofit. I met with the leader of the camp there, who also is the local leader of the church in that region. I wanted to know which people he thinks would benefit from a scholarship, and he told me about four people he thinks would benefit from a scholarship. All four people were campers at the camp, which is really cool because I got to know them all while I was there. Now, I need to build an application, which I will send to the director of the camp, Mr. Ogoudele, after which he will forward it on to each potential applicant.