What I want

I'm finding more and more through working here at this camp that I am able to learn quite a bit about myself. I work with hundreds of kids a week, and more personally with 20-30 kids a week within my own smaller groups. This gives me the chance to learn about the type of people I want to be working with in my career.

I find that (and I know I'll get criticized for this) children from churches or religious schools as well as children who come from moderate to highly wealthy backgrounds tend to be the least appealing to work with. This is not a prejudice, but simply a year's worth of observation. Both these groups tend to have issues with listening and always wanting to move on to the next thing before anything has been completed. They think it's okay to make fun of eachother and take out their cell phones during class (why do they have cell phones in 5th and 6th grade?).

This is not to say that the inner city kids that I tend to like working with more so don't have any of these same issues. To say that would simply be biased, because it happens. What I do see with groups who have less is that they glean more from what we're doing, even if they won't directly tell us that. If you are able to build a rapport with them and get out of the "why should we listen to you" cycle, you're completely golden, often enough.

These are kids who have never been away from pavement, let alone their own block. It can be frustrating to hear questions like "are there going to be bugs" and "why do we have to look at that", but in reality, these questions come from fear and the fear comes from the fact that there's no way to prepare for the new experience of nature if you never had it to begin with.

I take it for granted that I was able to roam around in the woods, and that my father took me to national parks many weekends as a child to explain all the wildlife he noticed that I would have otherwise missed. I take it for granted that I had safe and free reign of the forest behind my house and the only thing I had to worry about was a black bear (not that I ever saw one) and my mom getting mad at me for getting so dirty in the swamp. I take it for granted that my grandparents live on a huge plot of old farm land where we have the field, the farm and the creek, not to mention the forest. I was a girl who was much more lucky than these kids whose adventures as children are to gas stations and Wal-mart rather than a walk to the pond, or shoveling off the creek to go ice skating.

I'd also like to work on a longer basis with these kids. I feel like by the time I get them to trust me they have to go. Not only because it's always a short time in three days, but because these particular schools can usually only afford to come for two days, or sometimes even one. That just isn't enough time get the ideas across and keep the interest level up high enough to be very sustainable. A week would be amazing with any kid, let alone kids who don't know what they're missing.