Summer camp’s no picnic for teen volunteer
My friend’s 15-year-old is a great kid. He’s volunteering this year at a summer camp. To prepare, he went through three days of training and hours of reading. He spends 10 hours per day with the kids, much of that outside in sweltering heat. He’s expected to prepare his own food and is given one 30-minute break per day. He comes home exhausted. My friend and I laugh at the Dickensian treatment of these volunteers; we suggested that on a rainy day, they could watch Oliver! Should we talk to the director?
Are you old enough to remember Allan Sherman’s novelty song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh”? Written more than 50 years ago and set majestically to Ponchielli’s balletic masterpiece “Dance of the Hours,” it’s a pathetic letter home from camp, outlining the horrors of life under canvas. My favourite lines, in case you’ve forgotten them, are:
Now I don’t want this should scare ya’ But my bunkmate has malaria. You remember Jeffery Hardy? They’re about to organize a searching party . . . O, please don’t make me stay! I’ve been here one whole day!! Kids returning from camp complaining about food, weather, accommodations, other kids, bugs, leeches in the lake and so on — well, that’s a Canadian tradition, as much part of summer as BeaverTails or s’mores. I’m not suggesting your friend’s kid was exaggerating, but if he was working in “sweltering heat,” he wasn’t camping anywhere near where I live this summer. Wet, yes. Bugs? Yes. Sweltering? Not so much.
Please remember that, for almost everyone operating summer camps these days (with the possible exception of high-end sports camps and the like), it’s a tough go financially.
Girl Guides of Canada recently, and painfully, decided to radically cut back its camping program, potentially selling off iconic operations such as Doe Lake Camp, north of Huntsville, Ont. The difficulty faced by the Guides, in common with other camp operators, is keeping fees low enough that “ordinary” families can send their kids, while maintaining aging facilities and paying staff sufficient to meet contemporary safety requirements.
Our kid went to Doe Lake this summer for what was, essentially, a five-day camp, and it cost just shy of $800. Ouch. But even at those rates (which exclude many kids) not-forprofits often can’t keep operating. It’s a sad dilemma.
Your friend could chat with the director, sharing the concerns raised by his son and providing an opportunity for response. But if it were my kid, quite frankly, I wouldn’t even do that
So my advice? Don’t make too big a deal of this. Your friend could chat with the director, sharing the concerns raised by his son and providing an opportunity for response. But if it were my kid, quite frankly, I wouldn’t even do that.
The kid wasn’t abused — not really. He didn’t starve, die of heat stroke, suffer malaria or any other malady than exhaustion. Big deal; he’s 15, and exhaustion won’t shorten his life.
So I’d be telling him what my dad regularly told me in situations like this: “Live and learn. Not everything works out the way you expect. So make the best of it for the rest of this summer. If you don’t want to go back next year, we can look for somewhere else. But for now, suck it up.”
In a future job interview, “It was tough but I stuck it out,” sounds better than “my dad went whining to the boss.” Send your questions to star.ethics@yahoo.ca