Related Links:

• Summer Villages
• Educator Programs
• ACTFL

Mr. and Mrs. Kovala attended this year’s Family Week with three other grandchildren: George Nuutinen (5 years attendance), Hilda Nuutinen (4 years) and Henri LaMere (5 years).  Occasionally their daughter, Beth Nuutinen, has joined them for a Family Week as well.  Oona is also a frequent participant in Salolampi’s Adult Weeks.

Jim and Donna Kovala have attended Salolampi’s Family Week for five years, sometimes with up to six grandchildren.

Donna and Jim along with three of their grandchildren, receive five-year medallions at the closing program for session IB 68.

Jim and Donna with three grandchildren at this year’s Family Week.

Related Links:

• Family Programs
• Adult Programs
• Salolampi Blog
• Finnish Programs

Hi, my name is Emmelyn and last year I was a beginer like you.  The way I decided my language village was that my dad went to Korea and I wanted to learn Korean.  I couldn’t wait!  Driving there you might be a little nervus on your way.  But It’s quite exiting.  When you arrive you have to wait in line to give them your passport and then they will give It back to you so you can get money out of and into your acount.  And then you pick out a name and then they will get you a piece of white string to put your nametag on.  And you will put your name on it.

Then you go to the nurse and they see if you have lice or not.  Then you will go to your cabin, set up your bed, and hug your parents goodbye.  When you go to your first meal you will eat with your cabin members, later on you will eat in a family.  My meal always had rice.

Tell your parents to send a package from home.  It might make you feel better.  Casino Night is really fun.  You play games until you have no more tokens.

At the end your parents come and you go home.

If you want to learn more about what camp is like, visit our villagers pages.

The first year that eight-year-old twins Katie and Lucy attended the Language Villages, they came as day campers.  Though their mother, Debbie Hamill, had been a villager herself at Waldsee from 1977 to 1980 and their siblings Grant and Lee had been villagers already for several years, Katie and Lucy decided they might like to start their own Villages experience by attending a German day camp.

In years past, their brother and sister flew to camp, then their parents would come to Minnesota from their Austin, Tex., home to pick them up.  In 2007, though, their parents drove everyone to camp and stayed at a resort very close to the Waldsee site near Bemidji, Minn.  Grant and Lee attended overnight camp as usual, but Katie and Lucy attended only during the day, returning to the resort in the evening with their parents.

The twins did all the traditional camp activities, some with the overnight villagers and some just with the day campers.  They had a blast, learning to speak and understand German, swimming at the beach, visiting the Laden (store), and enjoying authentic German meals.   A highlight for them was being part of dean Dan Karl Hamilton’s progressive Village environmental activities, like planting trees to help Waldsee become carbon-neutral.

Katie and Lucy also liked that they had a lot of choices available to them during activity time.  In fact, that was their favorite part of camp.  Debbie says that she felt the staff worked hard to individualize the program to meet the needs and interests of the kids.  She says the counselors were “incredibly flexible and accommodating…they let the kids get out of the experience what they wanted to get out of it.  It’s an amazing place for kids to get to be themselves.”

After having a great time at day camp in 2007, Katie and Lucy both happily attended overnight camp in 2008.  Since they were already familiar with the site and the staff, it was an easy transition.  In fact, the German they learned at day camp was comparable to the amount of German their brother and sister had learned at the residential camps their first year, reports Debbie.

What’s the one drawback to the twins now attending overnight camp?  Debbie particularly enjoyed the day camp experience as a parent because she got to glimpse inside the camp every day.  It brought back memories of her own years as a villager.  Luckily for Debbie, Waldsee now offers summer family weeks, too!

So, we did the only thing two exhausted, ambitious post-grads could do — we chucked it all in favor of one more summer at sleep-away camp.

We moved our stuff to storage in Ames and hit the road north to Concordia Language Villages’ German camp, Waldsee, a language immersion camp in Bemidji, Minn., where campers learn the target language through play, songs, theater and real-life scenarios.

Waldsee, which means “Lake of the Woods,” is just one of the many programs Concordia Language Villages offers. At 48 years old, it’s also the oldest.  Adam and I met as counselors amid the camp’s birch trees at the edge of Turtle River Lake in 2001.

He was a bootstrapping Iowan with a knack for accents; I was a skeptical East Coaster with an obsession with all things German.  What we found in Waldsee that first summer – apart from each other, of course – was a play world, a little slice of Germany set deep within the Minnesota woods.

This year, we weren’t the only ones opting for a longer “staycation” instead of a quick trip across the pond. We met a few dozen parents that went with their kids to camp for one of Waldsee’s Family Week programs.  With airline fees rising exponentially and the dollar bowing out against foreign currencies, traveling abroad isn’t an option for a lot of Americans.  As students, it definitely wasn’t an option for us. Roundtrip gas to the camp costs about the price of a quarter of a seat on a plane to Germany.

Like traditional summer camps, Waldsee has traditions, rules, and adolescent dramas. But it is really a world apart — a place where everyone has free rein to take on a new identity.  At Waldsee, you check your American name and your identity at the front gate and receive a new name (in our case, “Pitt” and “Marlene“).  You swap your dollars for euros at “die Bank,” and you hand over any items that are verboten (forbidden) at customs (among them, music or books in English).

Days begin at about 7:45 a.m., when counselors awaken the cabins with songs — and sometimes a saxophone or violin performance. The whole camp meets at the Marktplatz (center square) for a round of singing before heading to the Gasthof (dining hall), where a traditional German breakfast is served. Campers learn words quickly when they have to ask for their food in German.

And you sing — man, do you ever sing: traditional songs, three-part chorales, rock ballads, jazzy jams, lullabies.  To see so many teenagers breaking into 19th century folk songs boggles the mind.  “I absolutely love Gesang [singing hour],” said a 13-year-old camper. “It makes the language click.”

As counselors, we tried to incorporate theater into every moment of the day. Sometimes my husband interrupted meals by jumping on a table and morphing into an evil comic book villain who called himself “Schrägenbogen” (Crooked Rainbow), whose only weakness is the German language.  ”Dankeschön! Autobahn! Gesundheit!” the campers yelled at him to bring him to his knees.

At about 11:30 each night, we drifted off to sleep in our separate beds in the camp’s newest construction, the Waldsee BioHaus, a German “passive house” built in 2006. Counselors use the building, which runs on 90 percent less energy than comparable American buildings, to teach that other German cultural tenet: green living.  Even in such impressive digs, falling asleep can be difficult. The loons yodel outside on the lake all night long, and mosquitoes, unfortunately, know no borders.

With 24-hour-a-day jobs like these, we might just have worked harder these past few weeks than we did in grad school. We certainly played harder.

Adapted from a story written by Waldsee staff member Emily Diesburg.  It originally appeared in the Des Moines Register, November 30, 2008.

Dr. Friedrichsmeyer became the first dean of Waldsee, the German Language Village, and a source of many innovations that define the Language Villages experience today. He and his staff were the first to transform a camp into a cultural immersion experience.  They made Waldsee look and feel like Germany with everything from signs and posters, to wearing Lederhosen and serving Wienerschnitzel. The activities they offered were culturally authentic and often new to the villagers. For example, many children were first introduced to soccer at Waldsee, as it was not widespread in the U.S. in the 1960s.

The idea for the distinctive curriculum came from Dr. Friedrichsmeyer and his staff as well, though he recalled that it was very challenging to develop. When he looks back, he remembers them brainstorming to devise activities that would make language interesting outside of the informal classes. On a visit to Waldsee this summer to pick up his grandchildren, Dr. Friedrichsmeyer observed that many of the curricular innovations he had dreamed up nearly a half century ago are still in place.  He found it very gratifying and reassuring to see that they are still effective and that the excitement that he witnessed in the early days, “is still there today.”

After his work with Concordia Language Villages, then called Concordia College Language Camps, Professor Friedrichsmeyer went on to teach at the University of Minnesota and then later to the University of Cincinnati.  However, he never lost his belief or connection to the program he had helped conceive.  His children, grandchildren and nieces have all attended the Language Villages.

Dr. Friedrichsmeyer believes that the Language Villages experience is “the first step toward becoming world citizens.  It helps [children] to develop a favorable attitude and aptitude towards foreign language and culture.”  Thanks to the foundation he helped build, thousands of villagers, including his grandchildren, now call themselves global citizens and are eager to explore the wide world he hoped they would learn to appreciate as much as he does.