Summer Camp: Crazy Things My Kids Have Said

And by "my kids" I do of course mean "other people's kids who I have the pleasure of looking after for a week".  I don't actually have kids of my own, even though 24 is "old" according to my girls this week.  I suppose it is quite old when you're only 10...

I'll add to this through the next couple of weeks, but here is some of the things the kids have said -

• "Are you kind of British?"
• "Is it true you have a prince over there? Do you get invited to balls?" (I love that they think England is like living in a Disney film)
• "Would you like some sunscreen?  You're too light to be dark"
• "College kids are smart.  We play with Legos and talk about how we hate things" (Said by a visiting college student)
• "Are you a regular person, or are you ghetto?"
• "What's your favourite disease?" - "Anything, so long as it's not an STD"
• "What's your religion?" - "I'm atheist" - "Oh. That's bad"
• "You have a smart car. It has two seats. There's you, your most trustworthy friend, the love of your life, and a pregnant woman. What do you do? ... You go home and rethink your life because you bought a Smart Car!"
• "When they put the jelly [jam] on my sandwich.  It fell off."  (My co-counsellor was just like...um...ok?)
• "Are you from British?" (Not only was this an incorrect use of the term, it was also said to an American counsellor!)
• "It's like having a headache in my legs"
• "What language do you speak in England?"
• "Don't bring weapons to camp" (When asked what the most important rule was at camp)
• "Do you wear hats in England?"
• "Is this what the jungle looks like? We'll have to kill all the innocent bunnies!"
• "No killing people" (When asked what a rule was for archery)
• "What's your weakness?" - "Pepper spray!"
• "I want to move to Africa to build homes and help people" (Can we get a big 'awwww'?)
• "I had a dream that a CIT was The Lorax. We were all the animals, and we all died.  He wasn't a very good Lorax" (Said by one of the counsellors)
• "You can't be eighteen. Teenagers are eighteen, not adults!" (Said to the above counsellor)

Summer Camp: Why Do I Do It?

My decision to volunteer at summer camp for 4 weeks has been received by a lot of confusion - from the airport immigration officer, to the youth leader I'm working with.  No-one can quite seem to understand why I would want to spend my own time and money to toil in the blistering heat for the sake of a bunch of kids with attitude.  Of course, if I looked at it like that...I wouldn't do it.

The youth leader (my Counsellor-In-Training this week) did seem to genuinely be curious though, and I can't say I blame her for wondering.  We were out on camp-out, and had been faced with nothing but negativity from the campers.  As we walked through the woods, carrying heavy camping equipment, sweating profusely in the high temperatures, she just asked "How do you do this?!".  At moments like that, I'm not sure myself!

The truth is, it's hard work.  It's exhausting.  I'm bone-tired.  I have the most ridiculous tan-lines.  I ache all over.  I'm covered in bug-bites.  I got badly sunburned last week.  I'm hungry.  I'm a fussy eater, and camp food can occasionally leave a little to be desired for a picky person like me.  My kids keep bickering, they won't listen, they answer back...but after camp, all of that fades.  You remember all of the negative things, but they're not the first thing that comes to mind when you think "camp".

Instead, you think about the other things.  The good things.  That's what camp is about.

It's the twins with their corny but slightly unexpected jokes that leave you howling.
It's the pre-teen girl announcing that she wants to be an organ donor.
It's the surprising vote of confidence from the loudest child, who recognises that counsellors have feelings (and get tired) too.
It's the conversations about diabetes at 1am with a little girl who doesn't let it get her down, but instead launches herself into the nurses office when she's "feeling low" shouting - "I is in da HOUSE!".
It's the young man who stands up in the Talent Show to defend a boy with special needs because he felt the audience wasn't being properly respectful.
It's the sound of childish laughter ringing across the camp.
It's the camp songs, sung with enthusiasm (if not much tune).
It's the campers shouting your name from across the field, who just want to wave and say hello.
It's being remembered by campers, even though a year has gone by.
It's the funny questions about England ("Do you get invited to balls?"; "Are you kind of British?").
It's the young lady making a stand against bullying.
It's getting to know the other counsellors as you make camper awards at 2am.
It's the little boy who jumps for joy every time his arrow hits the target in archery (even if it's not a bullseye).
It's the 10 year old girl working hard to learn Spanish so she can communicate with her new best friend who doesn't speak English.
It's the 7 year old girl who translates from English to Spanish, so the girl doesn't get excluded.
It's the boy who dances during the Talent Show, and the whole camp dances with him.
It's the girl who calls everyone her brother and sister, and loves her camp family dearly.
It's PB&J sandwiches, s'mores, and campfire fajitas.
It's the sound of the campfire popping as you lie under the stars.
It's the campers who cry when they have to leave.  And the counsellors who cry with them.
It's the 10 year old girl who says she wants to move to Africa "so I can build houses and help people".
It's the happiness found in the smallest of things, by the children who have the toughest circumstances.
It's the expression of joy and wonder on the face of a camper, because her counsellor took the time to read out her award in Spanish as she doesn't speak much English.  And it's all the hugs (and tears) that follow.
It's the 'cool' teenage boy who sings a song for his mom (who sadly passed away) in the Talent Show with his sisters. It's the moment where he wraps his arms around his sisters, bows his head, and cries. It's all the staff who cry with him. It's the moment the next day where he tells the other teenage boys that "it's ok to cry".
It's the 18 year old counsellor who tries not to cry as he explains how he feels like camp is "where I'm meant to be". It's his 20 year old friend, who never says much, who tells him how proud he is of everything he's achieved this summer. It's how proud I am too.
It's the tears as the summer ends, and everyone goes their separate ways. It's the promises to meet up, and stay in touch.
It's the friendships made that last forever.
It's the lifechangers.

That's why I come back.

40km Charity Walk

Update: I am sadly no longer able to do this walk (can't get the time off work after all), but Jen and her friend are still taking part.  Please sponsor them for my sake! Thank you :)

***

Once upon a time, there were two little girls who loved Disney.  One was called Charlotte (me!), the other was Jen.  When they grew up, they had a crazy idea, worthy of the Mad Hatter - they wanted to work at Walt Disney World, Florida.

They jumped through all the hoops, and finally found themselves being asked to go to Cardiff for a face-to-face interview.  They went online and talked to other crazy people.  That's where they started talking to each other.  Jen suggested they share a hotel, to split the cost.  I agreed.  Sharing a hotel room with a complete stranger, in a strange city - what's the worst that could happen...?

Five years have gone by since that day.  Both girls went to Disney.  Jen worked in retail at Disney's Animal Kingdom.

I was a custodian in Disney's Hollywood Studios.

Both girls stayed friends on Facebook, checking in on each other every now and again.  Jen was kind enough to invite me to her Alice in Wonderland themed hen party last year.  

That was the first time we'd seen each other since our interview in Cardiff.

I've been following Jen's progress as she has been running Tumaini Kenya, a charity in Kenya for street children, and those in juvenile prison.  They started in 2011, and have made a huge difference in the children's lives since then.  Jen runs the charity from the UK.  Her project worker in Kenya provides educational transitional support to rehabilitated street children, as well as providing support and awareness to children in prison to help them make good choices in their future. You can follow their blog here - Tumaini Kenya Blog, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.  

I don't know what it is, perhaps because their little faces remind me of my Ethiopian sister, but her work has struck a chord in me.

Now, all these years later, I have my answer to that immortal question - 'what's the worst that could happen?'.  Despite being hopelessly unfit, I've agreed to go on a 40km walk to raise money for a group of funny little children I've never met. 

I'll be joining Jen on 'Just Walk', which is a 40km trek across the South Downs, organised by 'Across the Divide'.  This is likely to utterly destroy me, but it's all for a good cause!

To sponsor me (please make it worthwhile!), visit the Tumaini Kenya 'Money Giving' page.  This is the main page for Tumaini Kenya donations, and is doubling as our team page.  Please state that you're sponsoring me (Charlotte) for 'Just Walk', so we can keep track of who's raised what.

I'll keep you up to date on my training, which so far consists of occasional walks around the school grounds where I work, and taking our boisterous puppy for a wander around the village.  The walk itself is on May 11th this year, so watch out for updates on how it goes!  That is if I survive... :)

All the best,

Charlotte

Update

There are new incentives to sponsor Jen Hanson, Nivraj Jassar, and myself!  Everyone who makes a donation of £5 or more, will be entered into a prize draw. The prizes are: Signed JLS perfume; signed Avril Lavigne perfume; a bottle of wine; a box a chocolates; and a fabulous £50 voucher for the cake shop, Dear Delicious in Gateshead.  Sponsor us at www.virginmoneygiving.com/TumainiKenya for a chance to win one of these great prizes.  Good luck!  Charlotte

Update

Well I've been back in the UK for about 2 weeks now, and what a 2 weeks it's been!

I've been to London, York and Folkestone.  I've applied for hundreds of jobs (certainly feels that way anyway).  I've swallowed my pride and signed onto job-seekers.  This means I have the joy of visiting the soul destroying building they refer to as the "Job-Centre".  All those stereotypes about the majority of people on the dole?  They're not exaggerated...

Don't get me wrong, some people there are hard working people who have fallen on hard times.  Like me.  Unfortunately we're in the minority.  Within minutes I find myself choking on the stench of stale cigarettes, my heart rate is through the roof from stress just from being there...and then there's the people.  If you ever wanted to find the meeting place of the world's ugliest people, just come on down to my local job-centre.  I'm not saying I'm a glamorous model, not by any stretch of the imagination, but at least I have all my teeth.

Anyway!  Moving on from my mini bitch-fest.  My blog is a happy place, sadly it's being tainted by the job-centre which is most definitely NOT a happy place.

I'd love to say that I've been travelling about and exploring my home country for pleasure.  I suppose I could say it.  But it'd be a lie and as an unforgettable professor once said - we must not tell lies!

Nope, it's not been anything so fun as that.  Instead, I've been dragging myself to various interviews.  First I went to London to sign up with an agency who seem confident they can find work for me in schools.  The woman was very nice and positive.  I left feeling good about my prospects - always a pleasant feeling.  I didn't spend long in London at all.  I was in and out of the Big City within 4 hours!

Next up was an interview at a boarding school near York (through this agency).  I was collected from the train-station by a chatty woman in a huge mini-bus.  All that bus from little me?  We drove up through the gates into "one of" their car-parks and parked up with the rest of the buses.  If any collection of buses deserved the term "fleet", theirs definitely did!

You may think it's a little sad, that I was this impressed with a car-park.  To be honest, you'd probably be right.  However, it did set a certain precedent for the rest of the school.  Based on this first impression (in a car-park), I expected it to be a grand, sprawling, high class school.

That didn't even begin to cover it.

This place was huge.  It was gorgeous.  It was the epitome of the "lifestyles of the rich and famous".

On my previous wage (as an admin assistant), it would take me 2 and a half years to simply earn the amount of money that these parents spend on one year's school fee.

The pool (for student use only) was possibly the most beautiful pool I've ever seen.  The school has stables to house your pony, or you may borrow a school horse.  There were multiple sports fields, both grass and astro-turf.  There were so many things for these children to do that they didn't do any of them.

To say I was over-whelmed would be an understatement.

It was amazing and everyone was very friendly.  It would be a pleasure to work at a place like that, especially since it's only an hour away from home.  Being able to easily see my family during time off seems rather appealing!  I was supposed to have heard back from them (via the agency) by Tuesday.  It's now Wednesday and I'm still waiting, but so it goes.  Que sera, sera!

Yesterday was a travel-filled day.  I was at the station just after 11am and on my train by 11.45am.  I had to change in London to get to Folkestone, which meant changing stations.  It wasn't too bad though, only Kings Cross to St Pancras.  Soon I was on the Javelin, a high-speed train, watching the south of England zoom by.

Weather-wise it was a miserable day.  I'm pretty sure there was one rain-cloud that covered the entire of the UK!  Luckily I caught a break in the rain at Folkestone and decided to walk to the school.  It was only 10 minutes away (15 after I got a little lost), and I was almost an hour early.  Following the directions on my not-so-trusty phone, I picked my way across pavements and roads, dodging puddles as wide as cars.  I almost got run over more than once as I was mincing about, trying not to get my shoes wet!

I finally found the right street - hurray!  Now to find the right building...not so simple.  I ended up walking past, looking more than a little lost.  Luckily, one of the staff members was watching out for me and came running to my rescue.  Apparently he remembered how difficult it was to find when he first went there.

I was given the grand tour of the school and its three (relatively small) Edwardian buildings.  It was the absolute polar opposite of the other school.  This school is in it's early development stages (read: it doesn't even have "school" status yet).  They've been an established English Language School for several years and is one of several English language schools run by one company.  They're now branching out and are becoming a boarding school, to add to their many "hats".  They will still run as an intensive school for adults and juniors (14-17 year olds), but the boarding school will be alongside that and will offer the whole GCSE and A Level curriculum.

The man who showed me around was very enthusiastic about the entire project.  He gushed a lot about "how often do you get to be part of starting up a school?" and I have to admit, his excitement was contagious.  He told me that the man in charge of the overall business has never shut down a school and he has high hopes for this one.  They have a school in Oxford which is their model for this school, but I was told with bundles of confidence "we're going to do it better!".  Well, who am I to argue with that?

The school was in a bit of uproar, as the brother of the Big Boss Man was visiting and had brought a new agent with him.  This meant that not only did they have to impress Big Boss Man's brother, but his also guest (who would be responsible for bringing more pupils to them).  The headmistress was entirely caught up with her esteemed guests, and I was left to chat with my tour guide.  We nattered away about summer camp, my teaching aspirations, the summer school he works at, and just about everything in between.  We swapped stories of challenging behaviours and giggled over some of the more bizarre experiences we'd had.

After a while, the "other, nicer meeting room" was available, so I was moved into there.  I sat down as he cleared away mugs, expecting that I'd be interviewed by the headmistress or someone similar.  Imagine my surprise when he sits down and announces that he will be interviewing me!  I think it was to my advantage that I didn't know this earlier though, since I'm pretty hopeless at interviews.  At least this way I was able to put forward a good impression before I turned into a babbling buffoon...!

Overall I felt the interview went quite well.  I don't think I rambled too much, some of my answers even made sense!  I just have to wait until next week now to find out.  I think I would greatly enjoy working at this school.  It would be an interesting challenge, and one I will probably never get the opportunity to repeat.  If only it wasn't so far away from home...

That brings me back up to date on my travels, but not even close to everything else I've been up to.

Since I came back, I've been re-writing my dad's website (which will go live as soon as the web-designer gets back off holiday) and running social media profiles for multiple businesses.  The most exciting venture I'm involved in (no disrespect to any of the others) is Ink Pantry Publishing.

Ink Pantry is run by a group of students (myself included) from the Open University's Creative Writing course.  We're working to publish a commemorative anthology of work from the course, and to date we've received 125 submissions.  With another 4 days to go that's spectacular!  We're currently debating titles for the anthology and trying desperately to rein ourselves in from picking images for the cover.  As tempting as it is, it's a bit difficult to chose a picture when we don't have a theme...ah well!  My dad has offered his services as a professional photographer...once we chose a title.

My role at Ink Pantry is to run their blog (whether that's writing posts or co-ordinating the publication of what other people write), their Pinterest and their Google+.  These appear to be the social rejects of our online presence as I largely end up talking to myself, but it keeps me amused!  The blog is far more popular, having generated a lot of interest on Facebook and Twitter.  We have a long list of ideas for posts, as well as several people lined up for interviews.  Upcoming interviews include published writers, illustrators, photographers and OU tutors.  We aim to provide updates on our progress, as well as topics we feel our community of followers will find interesting - so far we've written about book design and writing for the internet.  If there's anything people want to hear about, please drop us a line and I'll get it sorted!

Anyway, that's my marketing bit over and done with (for now).

Later this week I'll be attending a charity event for the Victoria Cross where Chris Ryan (SAS hero turned author) will be talking about his adventures.  Steve Oatway Photography are the official event photographers and we're very excited.  It's going to be very interesting and a whole lot of fun!

Next week I'll be heading over to York with dad.  He's decided he wants to take a day off to take some photos for fun.  Not for a client, not for promotional material, just for fun.  He has no agenda, no plan, just a camera and the whole of York to play with.  I'll be tagging along and will hopefully be writing a travel-related blog post about it soon after.  It's all well and good being a travel writer when you're a tourist abroad, but the real trick is viewing your home from a tourist's perspective too.

I think that's the main things I've been up to since I got home.  The rest of my time has been filled with settling back in, playing with my siblings and catching up with my family.  Not a bad way to spend my time at all!

All the best,
Charlotte

Tuesday, Blood Tuesday

I keep promising myself that I'll catch up with this blog, but life continues to race away from me! I arrived back in the UK yesterday afternoon after a crazy long journey (1 mini-van, 1 bus, 2 planes, 1 car and a whole lot of waiting around). I've been working at a family resort on Lake Champlain, Vermont for 3 weeks which has been good fun but I'm glad to be home. I seem to have escaped jet lag, but am quite sleep deprived all the same.

I decided that I'd get straight into the swing of things by jumping back into my English life with two feet. This meant that I was up and raring to go today at 7.30am (ok, I was awake...mostly). I took my little brother to school this morning, then headed over to my dad's photography gallery, Steve Oatway Photography, to assist on a photo-shoot. The client is Adele Carrington, an author who needs images to use for the book cover and as marketing material. To be honest, the thought of getting to meet an actual author who was publishing an actual book is the only thing that dragged me out of bed this morning!

We were told that the book is about a female vampire, and the image that Adele wanted involved a lot of fake blood and a white background. She would provide the vampire and the blood if we could provide the set.

Mum and I went to Tesco last night to buy a cheap king-size mattress sheet (background) and a kid's paddling pool (to catch the blood...). Fairly innocuous purchases, put to a slightly disturbing task!

After a few false starts, we were able to hang the background onto the crumbling brick wall (picture hooks – a photographer's best friend!). Our photography assistant, Lana, seemed to have a lot of fun decorating the set, though she complained that the blood was sticky and cold!

Just as we were finishing up, in walked Adele with her vampire, who was looking remarkably normal in jeans and a black top. No fangs or gothic dresses to be seen anywhere. Adele later explained that she didn't want to pander to stereotypes, and she had purposefully created a “Romany gypsy vampire” to escape the Hollywood clichés.

We all had a lot of fun on the set, especially giggling over the faces the vampire (Tina, a friend of Adele's) made as she was gradually covered in more and more fake blood. Apparently some of it was peanut butter, and she was quite put out that it was crunchy. I guess smooth peanut butter would have been more acceptable?!

There were several costume changes, liberal amounts of fake blood and a whole lot of laughs. Tina was a great sport and agreed to try almost all suggestions, most of which involved spreading blood across her face and hands! She drew the line at getting any in her hair (thus rejecting the idea of “let's just pour the jar over her head”) since she had a “very important, serious meeting to go to after this!”.

I was sent to the shop to buy some baby wipes (what better way to clean up blood?!) while everyone else had a coffee break.

On my way back, I paused outside our gate to see what it must look like to a passer-by. It was looked amusingly strange, but I suppose it could be worse, right? Somehow...? Though to be honest, I'm more concerned by what the black bin bag full of bloodied sheets and a paddling pool will look like to the bin men...!

In between shots I amused myself by taking some photos of the detail, such as of the vampire's blood-spattered diary and the mason jars full of blood!

All in all, this was a highly entertaining re-introduction into life in England as a photographer's daughter and some time gallery manager. If anyone reading this decides they need photos of vampires, please get in touch – we'd love to repeat this bizarre experience! Any challenge is welcome here.

I can't wait to see what will be thrown my way next, especially if all my upcoming projects involve this much fun.

All the best,

Charlotte