Five days to make a difference

by Vibh Forsythe

Reading Camp is a fantastic experience, I recommend it to almost anybody I meet. I say almost anybody because although it is a wholly rewarding experience, Reading Camp takes a special kind of commitment.

The most amazing thing, I think, to understand about Reading Camp is how quickly you become utterly invested in the lives of the children with whom you work. You start to take personally every hurtful comment of every eight year old to another, every incident of neglect on the part of teachers, staff and other counselors. In the environment of Reading Camp it can feel like a personal failure if your campers don’t get swim time.

It may initially strike the casual observer as over-investment. It is not. This is exactly the level of commitment required from a Reading Camp counselor. Once you understand the background of your campers and the kinds of lives they have lead before coming to you, your perspective changes. It is no longer a question whether you will remain silent about a wet bed and secretly change the sheets before they come back without any need for acknowledgement. You don’t think twice about giving up your flashlight so they can stay up and disturb your sleep. You’ll pull up as many chairs as are necessary so that anybody who wants to can sit at your table. You end up wanting to give them everything you know they don’t have at home.

Many of these campers have encountered more adversity in their lives than we the counselors and the staff are even prepared to hear about. Poverty, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, neglect and the list continues. It begins to hurt when you hear where they are coming from and what, in five days, you will be expected to send them back to face. It hurts even worse when they beg you at the end of the week “Please don’t make me go home”. All you can do is commit yourself fully to those five days.

So you don’t hold it against them when they can’t read. You walk the mile back to the cabin when they forget to change their shoes for the hike, you sleep on the floor next to their beds so the ghosts won’t eat them, you walk them to the nurse at 2 am and then back to your cabin to clean up vomit, because this is it, its all you can do. This is the five days you can make a difference to someone who may never before have had effort put forth on their behalf.

Reading Camp is a chance to give these kids something they haven’t been given. Something they clearly need in their lives. That’s why it is camp and not 15 hours of intensive tutoring. These kids need things that we as counselors have to be prepared to give. It may be as simple as attention, or you may be asked to substitute the loving discipline they don’t get at home. Don’t smother them. Don’t make assumptions. Let the rest of the world do that. Give them what they haven’t had. Give them a chance to show you who they are. Work together with them to find out what they are capable of. And in the end, appreciate who they have made you.

Vibh Forsythe is veteran Reading Camp counselor who was a part of the first South African Reading Camp this past summer in Grahamstown, South Africa. She is a member of The Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Lexington, Kentucky and is a graduate student at Ohio State University


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