Remember at every camp there was an oldish largish dude who couldn’t quite sit still after prayer and had problems standing up and who would look like he was falling asleep during the education programs? We all used to wonder what his problem was and why he was sitting among us kids.
This year, that dude is me. I haven’t been to a YMA camp since Myrtleford '97. Mahmud says he was looking at a camp booklet from that time. I was apparently a team leader. I was also in my mid-20’s and yearning to get married.
Now I’m 41, with a few near misses at finding a missus. Mahmud has more kids than I can remember. The eldest is in final year and is studying at uni. In a few years she will have graduated and be helping mums have kids. He once had a little baby girl I used to seat on my head. Mahmud now describes her as “a young lady”. His youngest wasn’t around when I was at the last camp. She is a 7 year old with an attitude and plenty of spunk.
Other kids who went to the camp at my time now have their kids as team leaders at the camp. That makes me too old to even be a camp elder. Some nerdy kid I used to do a radio program with is now “Shaykh Ahmed Abdo”. And yes, he really is a shaykh.
Well, sort of. He says that where he studies in Tarim in Yemem, they don’t call you a shaykh until you have become a master of at least one school of law. That’s a bit like me mastering the contents of Halbury’s Laws of England and Laws of Australia multiplied by 10. He believes he is years off achieving that feat. But he’s started. Ahmed has kids too. He introduced me to his daughter named Fatimatuz-Zahra. She was a little scared to come to the camp. She associates the bush with wild animals such as bears. God knows what she must have thought when she saw me.
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