|
It's one of the rituals of the American summer camp experience young campers starting each morning with group singing. But here at Al Waha, it's not the standard folk song fare.
The youngsters warble not in English but in a guttural yet soothing Arabic, the language they are learning in a two-week session on the shores of Minnesota's Leek Lake. As they sing, Al Waha's dean, Gazi Abuhakema, translates.
"My world is beautiful and wrongdoing will not happen," Abuhakema whispers. "A villager I am. Our caravan keeps moving forward in a big long procession." It's like much of what goes on at Al Waha, a common summer camp experience complete with rough-and-tumble games and arts and crafts sessions. But here at the newest of Concordia College's summer language camps, it's all in Arabic, led by bilingual counsellors from places like Egypt, Sudan and Lebanon teaching youngsters, most of them Americans, about the Arabic language and culture. Al Waha, which translates to "oasis" is Concordia's 14th summer language camp, the latest in a renowned programme that dates back to 1961 and has drawn students from around the country and world to learn languages as disparate as German and Chinese, Finnish and Korean.
Officials from Concordia in the nearby town of Moorhead said that with 200 million Arabic speakers worldwide and more than 600,000 in the US, the language 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 the Arabic language and culture all the more important.
"Our kids are meeting their counsellors and seeing they're young people just like them. They're not terrorists, they're not rich, they're not driving around in Mercedes," said Abuhakema, who is Palestinian, and a professor of Arabic and international studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. "So when something comes on TV, they can say, 'No, that's not accurate. I've been with Arabs before, I know them."
|
