Camps offer chance for fun, solidarity, healing
Camp Ooch and Camp Erin serve children with cancer or who have lost a loved one
If the Muskoka summer offers a natural refuge far from daily cares, it might be nowhere more true than at camps for young people facing some of life’s most challenging circumstances.
“It’s an absolute delight” watching what happens at Camp Oochigeas, says Lisa Nightingale, a spokesperson for the institution widely known as Camp Ooch. “The focus is giving kids with cancer a chance to be more than just a patient, a chance to be kids.”
This year, the Toronto Star’s Fresh Air Fund hopes to raise $650,000 to help send 25,000 disadvantaged and special-needs kids to camp at one of the 50 residential and 52 day camps it’s sponsoring.
One of those is Camp Ooch, which was founded in 1983 by a group of volunteers as a two-week program and has grown into a multi-faceted operation with family-based programs at its downtown Toronto offices — “the entire family goes through the journey of pediatric cancer,” Nightingale says — along with initiatives at the Hospital for Sick Children and three other pediatric hospitals across Ontario.
Best-known, however, are the overnight and weekend programs at Camp Ooch.
Nightingale told the Star the “unique part of it is we have our ‘med shed’ serviced by pediatric oncologists and nurses, many of whom our kids would already have had a relationship with at their local hospital when they were diagnosed with cancer.”
Ooch is the only camp in Canada, she said, that provides on-site IV, chemotherapy and blood transfusions. “We can actually serve kids while they are in a critical stage of their cancer journey.”
A camper might “receive IV chemo in the morning,” she said. “And they will go from there to water-skiing in the afternoon.”
Such impressive exploits notwithstanding, the most important thing for campers at the two-week camp program is being in an environment where their peers understand implicitly what things are like, Nightingale said.
“No one likes to travel a journey on their own,” she said. “These kids are often isolated from their peers at school. They’re often isolated even from their families when they spend time in hospital. Sometimes, they’re there for weeks that add up to months.”
Camp Ooch serves 1,500 kids with cancer and their families each year, she said, and is currently expanding to accommodate more at the Muskoka program.
“Our goal is to serve every child diagnosed with cancer in Ontario, and we know that right now there are 2,400 kids diagnosed with cancer in Ontario who don’t have access to an oncology camp.”
At Camp Ooch, the philosophy is “challenge by choice,” Nightingale said.
“We let them choose their activities. You’re not a kid with cancer, you’re a kid first. So what do you want to do?
“We’ve often had parents say, ‘Well, I can’t believe my daughter could climb that rock wall.’ And they come back on the day they’re picking up and their child is at the top of the rock wall.”
Friends often ask those who work at Camp Ooch about the emotional toll, she said. “But we really focus on the friendship and fun. We are delighted and filled with joy at all the positive experiences that happen and I think that overshadows any of the other challenges we may face.”
Camp Ooch’s staff of almost 60 is supported by over 550 volunteers, she said, some of whom use their own holiday time to work at the camp.
“Those volunteers continue to come back year after year after year. It’s an experience that fills them.”
“That gives us the ability to keep our program costs low and all of our programs are offered for free to the campers and their families.”
“We greatly, greatly appreciate” the Fresh Air Fund’s support, Nightingale said.
Not so very far away, a little north of Parry Sound, is Camp Erin, a bereavement camp for children who have experienced the loss of a family member.
Lisa Toye, a counsellor at the Dr. Jay Children’s Grief Centre and co-director of Camp Erin, said that among peers they know have had the same experience, kids are able — maybe for the first time — to acknowledge and talk about their grief.
“The kids that we work with are extraordinary and they are going through really extreme adversity, experiencing the dying or death of somebody in their lives,” she said.
“It’s one of the most human experiences. Every one of us will go through life experiencing the death of somebody that we care about and yet, just like the experience of dying, it’s so marginalized and our society is so uncomfortable with it.” The Camp Erin model was born in Washington state, where former major league pitcher Jamie Moyer’s charitable foundation established the first Camp Erin, named for a teenage girl with whom the Moyer family became close during her illness.
“In many ways it looks like a typical camp experience,” Toye said. “We do all the super fun camp things — canoeing, high ropes, arts and crafts, archery, woodworking.”
But — as with three other such camps in Montreal, Cornwall, Ont., and Hamilton — they also have coun- selling and therapeutic activities at which campers learn “that they’re not the only ones who have had these feelings, and that these feelings are normal.”
There’s lots of laughter through the weekend program, “also tears,” and moments when kids say, “Oh, my God, I’ve never talked to anybody about this!
“For kids, it’s so important. They may not have known anybody else who had a father die. But at camp, there are lots of other kids who have.”
This year, Camp Erin accommodated about120 children, “but it’s always a struggle for financial resources,” Toye said.
“We don’t want there to be any barriers for kids participating.”
In a perfect world, there would be no need for such camps for children bearing way too big a burden for their years.
In the world we have, supporting them is the least we can do.