Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture

Brahim teaches Arabic to teenagers at Al-Bustan Camp.

July 2009

Teaching at Al-Bustan Camp was a transformative and instructive experience for me this summer.  It was amazing to work with these multi-national children and youth whose parents are from all four corners of the world.  Every one of them came with his/her cultural traditions and linguistic background; but they all had one thing in common, their American identity.  They shared their American citizenship.  They also shared English language as their daily language of communication with variant degrees of use of their parents’ mother tongues.  As I was working with them, I wondered how my own future children would be, of how they would relate to their parent’s American and Moroccan identities.

As for my students, I believe that the camp was an opportunity for them to open their minds and accept the other.  Christian, Jewish and Muslim youth being together for three weeks in an Arab environment is unique and happens very few times in a person’s life.   They learned how to love, accept,, and communicate with each other.  These youth might go to the same independent or public school but they are unlikely to experience anywhere else the kind of environment fostered  by Al-Bustan.

The camp was a transformative experienProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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for me because I learned a lot about the importance of art, drama and music in shaping young people’s culture and identity.  It was very interesting to see the children sing Arabic songs, dance to Egyptian and Iraqi music, and play out Ibn Al-Haytham’s life story.  Most of all, they related deeply to what they were doing.  I learned that the arts are one of the best keys to enter people’s hearts and minds and teach them softly about Arab culture.

The camp was an instructive experience for me because it is different from all the environments in which I have worked throughout my ten years as a teacher.  At certain times, I was wishing that all the schools were summer camps like Al-Bustan’s where kids could have the freedom to learn in a different way.  Chasing Ibn Al-Haytham and trying to retrace his life and reconstruct its fragments so that all the campers could vicariously travel from Iraq to Egypt in a different period of time was challenging but very motivating to find ways to make the campers comfortable and eager to learn more.

I see parallels in Al-Bustan Camp bringing light to all our lives as Ibn Al-Haytham brought light to the world.  In the same way Ibn Al-Haytham found out the way light reflects into our eyes and we can see, I can say that the light Al-Bustan Camp brought to the lives of these youth and their parents is the light of knowing the other.  The real light Ibn Al-Haytham brought to our life is the light of seeing the beauty of difference in the campers’ eyes.  It is amazing that a man who developed light theory died in Egypt long ago but his legacy continues to shed light on us here in America, a thousand years after his death.

Overall, I think that this experience would not have been as transformative, enriching, nor instructive without the great team of teachers and counselors that Al-Bustan hired for the camp. It was a unique collective experience in which I feel that everyone put a little piece of their heart.

Al-Bustan Camp was definitely one the greatest multi-cultural events of my life and I feel honored to have been a part of this year’s camp.

- Brahim El Gabli, Arabic Teacher