Sunday morning was a new experience for the camp, even for the veteran staff members. Because the week started on Saturday for the campers, the whole camp attended church Sunday morning up the hill from camp. The directors gave an overview of what our week was to look like. Then, each group of campers performed the skit of their lesson the previous night and led the congregation in a favorite camp song. After the service, the campers were given the opportunity to socialize with the church members for a bit before heading back down to camp. Personally, I really enjoyed this service. It gave the church an opportunity to see a glimpse of what the camp is like, and I think the campers really enjoyed it as well for the most part. When we arrived back at camp, we took individual, crew, and whole group pictures with all of the campers so that the pictures could be developed on time to give them to each camper by the end of the week. After this, we ate lunch. At mealtimes, we made sure to have 3 staff and 3 campers at every table. The staff would then ask the camper what food he or she wanted and bring back a plate for the camper and him or herself. Some of the campers were on "special diets", which meant that they had food allergies or needed to watch intake of things like sugar, calories, etc. At the end of each meal, the directors would give final instructions about who was on kitchen clean-up duty (or KP) for that particular meal and then we would dismiss with a camp song.
After lunch, the campers had rest time. My co-intern and I had a group for recreation, so we set up for that during rest time. We ended up playing bocce ball with the campers, as well as options for a toss game, bubbles, and puzzles for any who didn't want to be as active. Some of the campers in the group were Special Olympians, and bocce is one of the events they compete in. They were really good, and it was fun to interact with them and hear them talk a little bit about their Special Olympics experience. While we had recreation, some campers had worship prep for the evening and the rest were in crafts.
I had my first experience leading a Bible lesson group Sunday evening. My group had the story of Saul's conversion, so I had looked over the lesson beforehand to get a few ideas for what I could do with it. However, I hadn't planned for the fact that a lot of my group was nonverbal. This was a completely new experience for me, and I'm very thankful for my co-leader, who jumped in several times when I needed help. It was really interesting for me to have this group, since I'll be a Speech-Language Pathologist by the time I'm out of college, but it also gave me a ton of respect for those who work with nonverbal people on a daily basis. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of close attention to the little cues they give -- a skill I am only starting to develop.
Tonight I was able to attend the staff meeting, which was really nice. We went over the list of the campers and discussed anything we had observed -- any good things we noticed or any challenges to work on as a staff. We also assigned jobs and talked about special events the next day. It was so great to have time as a collective staff to reflect on the day and talk about what we could do differently the next day. We had a really great staff, and it was awesome to spend some time with all of them together.
Day 2 was also a good day; however after today, I was feeling quite a bit more tired and slightly overwhelmed by the challenges I knew I would face for the next few days.
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