Life at Camp 

A typical day at camp

There is almost no such thing as a typical day at Africamp! You create your own days. Africamp’s schedule is packed with courses, sports, evening activities, and everything else we can possibly fit in. In every course slot, there are lots of courses to choose from, with a variety of topics and levels of difficulty. Every evening, there are lots of activities going on such as: sports, terrain games, dancing, board games, and all the wacky and creative events that the young leaders and campers can dream up. Everything on the schedule is optional: campers choose which program they would like to attend. We provide a framework in which you can learn a lot and have lots of fun.

During regular camp days, here is what will happen:

TimeCampers Program
7:30Sports 1
8:30Breakfast 
9:00 – 12:30Morning courses (short break 11:00 – 11:30)
12:30Lunch
13:30 – 17:00Afternoon courses (short break 15:00 – 15:30)
14:00 – 16:00Social time/ free time
17:00 – 18:30Afternoon activity
19:00 – 20:30Dinner
19:00 – 21:00Evening Activity
21:00Diary Time

After lunch, we have journal time. During this period, campers spend some time with their youngleader and their roommates. We want campers to reflect on their daily experiences by having them write down what they did, learnt, enjoyed or felt. This allows them to document their memories to show at home as well as practice English through writing about a topic they care about.

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Your Residential Advisor

Each room of campers is assigned to one Young Leader (YL) who lives on campus with campers and plays an active role in residential life at camp. At camp, the YL is the focal point of contact among the staff. Also, the YL will assist you with choosing your courses and scheduling your day.

If necessary, your YL can help you with personal issues, conflict resolution, or crisis response.

Evening Activities

Among Africamp staff, we say that: «the courses are for the parents, the evening activities are for the kids» – which points out how parents usually send their kids to camp because of the courses, but what the kids remember the most are usually the evening activities where they enjoy the unique camp atmosphere.

Our Young Leaders organize a vast range of activities during the evening, ranging from swimming in the ocean, basketball, ultimate frisbee, boardgames, storytelling, to more complex ones like terrain games, treasure hunts, economic simulation games and the like.

Below you find the description of some evening activities, however, note that each camp has a unique schedule of activities. By letting staff members organise the activities their most passionate and skilled at, we believe we will maintain the best quality.

SOCIAL ACTIVITIES

No camp without camp fire! We will sit around the fire below the stars and enjoy the wonderful tropical nights whilst singing songs. We will start with English songs and then sing songs in other languages as well.

Children love to hear true stories of adults who are in a real relationship with them. Many of the camp organizers had a story of life with many ups and downs and a lot of life lessons learnt. During this evening activity, camp organizers and volunteers will tell their favorite anecdote out of their life, be it how they made a radical decision, how they travelled around the world, how they founded their first company, or just what brought them to Zanzibar. Some will illustrate their story with Powerpoint slides, pictures and videos, other may bring some material. All stories are briefly summarized in a schedule, so campers can choose which ones they want to listen to.

After having heard the biographies and stories of the camp organizer, we give campers the opportunity to ask them questions and talk to them in a relaxed atmosphere. We believe that youth needs access to all kinds of adults from all kinds of professions, not only to teachers and parents, in particular a profession becomes much more tangible for children and teens if they know someone who actually does it and explains them what he does everyday. So, we want to give our campers the opportunity to talk about life paths, decisions and goals, or anything else they want. The atmosphere under the beautiful stars in Zanzibar with candles and tea will be encouraging long discussions.

PowerPointKaraoke is like music karaoke, but with powerpoint slides. You receive a PowerPoint presentation whose slides you have never seen before and you must hold a presentation. Laughter guaranteed!

This is an opportunity for campers to present a particular skill or talent of theirs in front of the audience. This will boost their self-confidence and make them more comfortable of holding presentations. The show will be practiced with young leaders and then performed at the last evening of camp.

TERRAIN GAMES

Capture the flag is a terrain game played in teams. Players need to cooperate and organize themselves to perform coordinated operations in a vast terrain.

In this terrain game, the goal is to bring as many coins as possible from a central place to your teams base. However, you may carry only one coin at a time, and when you have a coin, others may catch you. Although the rules are extremely simple, there are many different strategies to win, and it is interesting to watch how different teams use different strategies. Some may just run as fast as they can, others might line up in one line and pass coins, others might even try to catch opposite teams coins

Stratego, the terrain game is a real-time outdoor strategy battle game, a great mixture of various games: Its core mechanic is adapted from the namesake board game «Stratego» (classic 2-player army strategy game) but there are also mindgame elements like in mafia. The terrain gets involved similar as in the classic terrain games ‘capture the flag’ or ‘hide and seek’. And finally, discussion and communication in the team is highly important since there are various roles and the available information increases as the game develops. On top of this, the terrain around Assalam with its jungles and plains seems perfect for vast Stratego battles.

The classical social deduction game – although known by different names in different countries (e.g. Werewolf in german-speaking countries, Mafia in Slovakia, Ktulu in Poland, etc.) – always has the same structure: two teams with hidden identity compete by trying to find out who is in the other team. The game takes turns with days and nights. During the night players can secretly perform actions according to their character, but during the day all characters are hidden and the only tool available is discussion and voting. This game teaches logical thinking, bluff, keeping a poker face at all times, coming up with good arguments.

The classical social deduction game – although known by different names in different countries (e.g. Werewolf in german-speaking countries, Mafia in Slovakia, Ktulu in Poland, etc.) – always has the same structure: two teams with hidden identity compete by trying to find out who is in the other team. The game takes turns with days and nights. During the night players can secretly perform actions according to their character, but during the day all characters are hidden and the only tool available is discussion and voting. This game teaches logical thinking, bluff, keeping a poker face at all times, coming up with good arguments.

games

Games

we believe in the power of learning through games, therefore we offer a vast range of terrain games and tabletop games to teach communication skills, teamwork and strategic planning. Some of the games are uniquely developed for camps and are designed to be played with as many players as possible to simulate economic market mechanisms.

Also, Africamp has it’s own board games library on campus where campers can have many games explained by young leaders during their free time.

Testimonials

I loved the survival classes. It was so fun to make a fire together after swimming to the sandbank.
I never thought it was possible to make a fire in the middle of the ocean
Mina
Camper Zanzibar
I will miss young leader Hasan.
We were playing funny games with him at the evenings
Maureen
Camper Tanzania
I made new friends and we still videocall each other
Maryam
Camper Turkey
I protect your safety on the compound
Junior
Security dog
I want to come back next year
Raheem
United Kingdom