It was the last day of Camp Ramadan, and a sea of smiling parents had their arms outstretched, holding up more than a dozen cellphones to capture all of the song and dance and children’s humor contained in the end-of-camp assembly. And onstage, a normally polite and bookish 11-year-old was channeling Donald Trump.
“As a leader, who do you wish to serve?” a child, playing the role of debate interviewer, asked the boy’s character — a certain political candidate with the alias of Ronald McDonald.
“I wish to serve my very fantastic self,” answered Amir-Abbas, 11, provoking peals of laughter from the parents. Money, he told the interviewer, is the key to great leadership — and he had lots of it.
“I’m trying to make America great again by kicking out Mexicans, Muslims and African-Americans,” he added.
“By the way,” he said, sweeping a hand over his dark, cropped hair. “This hair is real.”
When Mona Eldadah started this camp four years ago, the idea was mainly about getting fasting Muslim kids off the couch during the holy month of Ramadan, and into activities that were both creatively stimulating and unifying.
“I felt like kids were having this isolated experience fasting at home, and felt like, ‘Ugh, I’m the only one doing this,'” explained Eldadah, an interior designer and mother of four. And so began Camp Ramadan — a weeklong camp at the end of the month, where kids can fast together while also doing activities that are more enriching than watching Netflix.
Now, the camp has reached its largest number of campers to date at 101, and has acquired the reputation as a place where Washington-area Muslim kids can learn about and practice a core Muslim tradition, while making friends, creating art and talking freely about current affairs — like Trump.
This year, Eldadah’s nonprofit organization, the New Wave Muslim Initiative, rented the Waldorf School in Bethesda, Md., for the week of camp.
“You think this age group is young,” she said, taking the stage at the end of the leadership skit featuring the Trump character. “But (they’re) also very mature, thoughtful children.”
Fasting during the daytime hours of Ramadan is one of the core religious obligations of observant Muslims, and is meant to foster a greater connection to God. The practice typically starts around puberty, and for many preteens and teens, serves as an informal rite of passage into Muslim adulthood.
Fasting is hard; especially when it’s hot outside and you’re new at it. “But when they come here, they kind of struggle together,” said Eldadah. When they arrive in the morning, “they’re kind of sleepy. But by the end, they’re so excited.”
For a week this year, the campers practiced paper marbling, created watercolor sunsets with a foreground of a domed mosque and minarets and took pictures of one another with rented cameras on the school’s playground.
The 6- and 7-year-olds went on a hike to a nearby cave to learn about how the prophet Muhammad visited a cave outside of Mecca, where Islam teaches that he received the word of God. And the 8- and 9-year-olds decided to make their end-of-camp skit about the animated characters from the movie “The Minions” observing Ramadan. (The Minions are tempted to break their fast when they see a banana, the characters’ main food obsession in the popular 2015 children’s film.)
The youngest children, ages 3 to 5, learned about the animals of the Koran. (“Old Mustafa had a farm,” they sang at the last day’s assembly in a muddle of high-pitched, off-tempo toddler voices. “And on that farm he had some bees — with the blessing of Allaaaaah.”)
And the 12- to 16-year-olds met the Afghan American author Nadia Hashimi, who read them a passage from her new book, “Half from the East,” about an Afghan girl whose parents disguise her as a boy so that she can help provide for the family in a restrictive Afghan society.
“How do you think that makes girls feel?” Hashimi asked the adolescents, prompting a discussion about gender equality, followed by an exercise in storytelling.
Each day at about noon — when most other campers would be breaking for lunch — the kids at Camp Ramadan troop into the school’s auditorium, stand shoulder to shoulder and then kneel in unison for prayer.
The kids at Camp Ramadan come from a mix of Muslim families, Eldadah says. Some of the girls wear headscarves; others wear shorts and T-shirts. Some of their families attend the mosque regularly; others don’t go at all. But nearly every single one of the 12- to 16-year-olds this year is fasting.
Coming here makes a difference, said Aziza, 12, who knelt on the floor with five of her best girlfriends on a recent day, packing up goody bags for the younger kids to mark the end of Ramadan. “At home you just get super lazy, like, ‘Ehh, the bathroom is sooo far!’ ”
The others giggled in agreement. At home they’d be sleeping through the fast, or watching TV, they said. Now the fun of camp distracts them — sort of — from the fasting, and they still get to have sleepovers and watch Netflix at night.
