Lebanon election night!
Published: August 1, 2018
Assalamu alaikum, everybody! Today was one of those days when the difference between standing in the shade and standing in the sun seemed enormous.
Anyway, the day campers today did one of the most fun activities in the universe, and that was blowing bubbles!
Also, today was Lebanon day, and the evening program was on elections in the Middle-East. One of our counselors was in Lebanon during their elections, which were held this year for the first time in nine years. Therefore, all day, villagers were subjected to speeches and propaganda by the candidates.
The villagers went to their mughamarat as usual today. One group learned about how to connect letters together into a word when the letters are at the beginning, middle, and end of the word, and practiced connecting those letters together to make new words.
In another mughamara, villagers learned the Arabic names for the months, including the names of the months in the Islamic calendar, along with the holidays celebrated in the Middle-East.
A third group practiced their vocabulary related to family through a game.
In the arts and sports period, the acting group continued practicing their rendition of Cinderella.
The basketball group continued playing basketball.
And, the cooking group switched it up by making hummus.
In today’s musalsal, the tooth fairy’s aunt hits the tooth fairy over the top of the head with a frying pan to prevent her from killing Mohamed Salah and getting in trouble. Mohamed Salah, saved, goes off looking for a place to stay for the night and finds himself in front of Goha’s house. He asks to stay for the night, and Goha agrees, but warns him that it would be better for him to stay just about anywhere else. Goha’s words prove to be true, as Robin Hood exercises all night to impress the tooth fairy with his muscles when he next sees her, and Fayrouz and Um Kulthum won’t stop singing throughout the night. When Mohamed Salah wakes up, he complains that he can’t focus on making a plot to defeat the tooth fairy because he hasn’t slept. The crew begins to argue again, and that’s when the tooth fairy reappears. What happens next? Stay tuned to find out!
Then, in the evening program, we continued with the elections. We had registered to vote at lunch time, and after dinner, we split up into our dinner families and headed to the voting location allocated to our family. We had to remain in the dining hall, as it was storming outside this evening! We were not permitted to vote at any other location besides our own family station. We also had to ink our thumbs to make sure that no one voted more than once. Once the election results were announced, we held a debriefing session about the election and discovered that one of the candidates was corrupt and had voted for herself at least six times at the election! The election official who counted the ballot, as well as the corrupt candidate, were arrested, and the rest is history. We also talked about what elections were like in general and compared US elections to elections in the Middle-East, as well as talked about what we could have done to make the election more fair and democratic.
And that’s pretty much it! Thanks for dropping in! See you tomorrow, inshallah!