Camp

You all will be glad to know that I survived my week at Camp Cheery. For the first few days it looked as though my lack of sorority-ness would doom me to failure, but I actually had a really great week. Orientation was the hardest part. I was staying with 9 girls who were my exact opposites or at least led very different lives from mine. I felt like I did when I was that weirdo at school. I was not at in a sorority, and the only intense parties I attended this year were study parties. By the end of the first day I was ready to leave. But things looked up pretty quickly, I bonded with the 2 other non-sorority counselors, and we had a really great, really dorky time during orientation.

Once the campers arrived, things really started to look up. My co-counselor and I had the best cabin! They went to bed early; none of them were homesick, and we only had one small behavior issue. By the end of the week my ego was so inflated it was insane. I was basically skipping around camp going, "Who's a great counselor?  This kid! Oh yeah! Oh yeah!" In my head that is. I really try not to be blatantly prideful/obnoxious. 

Anyway, being a camp counselor has a whole lot of job satisfaction. All my little girls were very sweet. One day they brought me a slightly squashed day lily because they knew it was my favorite. They hastened to explain that they had found it on the ground, so it was okay, right? Even my one behavior problem turned out to be a very sweet, albeit very sad, little girl. In fact, when I had the chance to talk to her one on one, I found that she was a very smart, thoughtful kid who just needed a little more attention. 

This same girl, whom I'll call Becky, was probably the kid who made my job seem really important. At all the meetings before camp opened, the directors would say things like, "You will never know the impact you will have on these girls' lives." And I thought, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." But Becky made me realize that what they said was true. From the start, Becky was a handful. She was loud, never listened, and seemed to have a knack for riling up the other girls. I was about to lose patience with her when something happened. The ringtennis coach (I'm not 100% sure what ringtennis is either), came up to my co-counselor and me and told us that she had had the girls going around the circle saying their names, where they were from, and why they had come to camp. Becky, after giving her name, had informed the group that she was there because her parents "needed a break." 

Immediately Becky's behavior became understandable to me. If her parents had that attitude about sending her to camp  no wonder she was trying to attract attention. This is the only part of  camp that truly made me unhappy: I had a week to prove to these girls that they are loved, something which their parents are not willing to show them in a lifetime.  Honestly getting the chance to treat Becky like the intelligent, sweet little girl that she is made my week-long job (and puny paycheck), seem worth it.