session 4

my group of kids for session 4



Camp week 4: “Wild West Adventures” in Wagons west with summer, piranha and swiss miss.

Argh this week is dragging on a lot. And when it goes slowly and you have adifficult kids, it makes me want to be home. This program has a reputation for having the wild kids who are not allowed on horses every day, and get only one horseback ride in the week. We sleep in covered wagons, cook pioneer meals, have a sleepout under the stars, learn about trail signs, watercolour wild west paintings, tie knots, learn about outdoor safety, outdoor clothing, campfire lighting and cooking etc… Plus we’ve had nature, art, leadership, a dance party, kayaking, dawn drifting in canoes, polar bearing (swimming at the unearthly hour or 7am in a cold misty lake) etc…

My week didn’t start off too good. We have all the crazy kids and a lot of them have moral issues and can’t get along. Like, one girl, Evelyn, is ALWAYS crying and homesick, to the point where her eyes have just become puffy black bags sinking into her head. Another girl, Marcella, steals the other girls clothes and blames it on the chipmunks, and just then I caught her trying to do black belt on Evelyn. The other two girls in the cabin were friends before camp. Taryn is ADD I’m sure, and can’t sit still, thinks its ‘cool’ if someone gets hurt, and thinks ‘whispering’ at 12:30 at night means yelling at the top of her lungs. Just today, I went in there and lost my patience (as I keep doing now), getting a very scary tone of voice I didn’t think I was capable of, told them to be silent, listen to me, don’t steal, respect each others personal space and belongings, and Taryn said Marcella had been singing songs “that were making her feel uncomfortable.” Apparently she had been singing “My Humps” and when I told her that song was not Camp Appropriate (CA), she said “my mum was bad, my dad was bad, they didn’t bring me up right and I was abused.” Scary thing was though, she had the straightest face and I couldn’t just toss it off as a joke. I wouldn’t be surprised.

The first night they didn’t get to sleep until after midnight because we had Taryn yelling into the other cabins, and four flying purple cows (code word for homesickness). Then they decided to wake up at first light, ie 4:30am, and I got sick of it and at 5am got up and walked down a treacherous trail from the staff wagon to the kids wagons, and tripped on a stump. I tripped over and let out a silent “OWWWWCCHHH!!”, got up, walked into their cabin and said in the scariest voice ever “GET ON YOUR BEDS. NO MORE WORDS FROM ANY OF YOU. I’VE JUST BROKEN MY TOE GETTING OUT OF BED TO KEEP YOU QUIET AND IM NOT IMPRESSED WITH YOU. YOU ARE BEING DISRESPECTFUL AND DON’T EXPECT TO BE STAYING AT CAMP IF YOU KEEP THIS UP.” They knew I wasn’t lying about the toe, and actually managed to keep quiet for a few hours. I walked back up to the other cabin, and said “ReRun, can you have a look at my toe?” She saw my pinky toe sticking out at a 45 degree angle, the nail broken and the ‘ring’ toe next to it cut open, and said “you’ve broken it, now go back to bed.” I had to take a panadol, but managed to get back to sleep.

Great start to the week. the nurse wrapped it up a bit but theres nothing you can do for it. Worst thing is there is so much walking every day, up and down very steep hills.

Summer and I are exhausted. I have no energy, and I am sick of my own voice, answering thousands of pointless kiddy questions, pretending to listen to stupid kiddy stories that drag on and have no point, telling kids to put sticks down, chew your food, ‘whose water bottle,” “I’m homesick” blah blah blah.

Summer isn’t very helpful either – she is a very lazy Unit Leader (UL). Like, I have found that I have had to do all the conflict resolution – and there has been a lot of that. And she complains all the time, almost worse than the kids, about things like taking out the rubbish, and the mozzies.

After our packout lunch (which was disastrous – the kids didn’t eat until 9:30pm), we had to clean up so the squirrels and rats didn’t get into the hutcheon and wreak havock. No-one had taken out the rubbish all week so it was so heavy the bag was splitting. So Swiss miss and I double bagged it, which took effort. Summer hadn’t done anything so we volunteered her to take it up to the dumpster in the pull along wagon. After an hour of complaining, I went with her. It was actually quite funny. It was 11pm and we were dragging a heavy garbage bag (which we joked had goonie’s body in it), summer pulling the wagon infront, her silhouette looking like she was disposing of a body in a horror movie. We were laughing so much by the time we got to the top that we were wetting our pants. We tried all sorts of ways to get the bag into the dumpster, eventually climbing on top, summer dropping it on me and me taking the full weight of it as I hugged it on my knee. Apparently the others could hear all the noise we were making. Strange memories!!

On Wednesday night, I cracked. During dinner I sat with two very homesick girls. I got them laughing in a little bit, by talking about imaginary friends transforming into black dots on the ceiling, and coming back when you need them: “there’s a purple giraffe, I wonder whose imaginary friend that is?” It was fascinating the kids perspective on it. I took them out to get something to eat, and made a PB&J sandwich, one eating it, and one just screwing it up in distress. Then they started wailing again. I had been asking goonie for ages to speak to the girls, because they were so totally and utterly miserable, and all they wanted to do was to speak to their parents. But I knew that wouldn’t make it any better. It just felt so cruel. I handed them over to goonie finally, after I had followed goonies instructions to tell the kids to stay one more night to see how they’d go, and the kids erupted into tears, evelyn saying “I will pack my bags and walk home, this is a prison.” I had had a very tough start to the week, and the moment I handed them over, I burst into sobs, running into the bathroom and sitting on the toilet until I got a grip of myself again. I came out and found clover, sharkie and flick, who comforted me on the step. I had missed dinner, so clover, who is so amazing, raded the kitchen and produced a banquet for me, instructing me to eat the brownies first. It’s a very difficult burden, and it made me feel homesick too. Flick was like, ‘don’t go all flying purple cow on me’.

The next day after going on an amazing trail ride on the horses, through the whole of camp, on narrow walking trails through the forest, feeling like something out of LOTR, the homesick girls went home. From then on the week got a lot easier, and I could bond a lot better with the rest of the kids. I even discovered that taryn had a secret talent, farting using her neck, knee and armpits.

We had a night out under the stars, which was amazing, but I was absolutely eaten alive by mozzies. Its weird looking at the stars from the other hemisphere. Like you expect to see a familiar sky, and its completely different. The pine trees towered above me, silhouetted under a star-dotted clear Washington state sky.

The next night the kids slept in their cabins, but we were eaten alive in our wagons, so at 3am we hauled our mattresses and stuff down the treacherous path to sleep out under the stars again. I am glad we did, because otherwise it would have made for the most frustrating night of my life (hot, humid, and mozzies – like sleeping by a swamp in cairns I guess)

I couldn’t wait until the four day break. Star and I decided the night before that we should somehow get to Canada. And kitty decided half an hour before we had to leave that she would come also.