Hello everyone!
My second week at camp has been a wonderful roller coaster ride. This week, I learned that working with kids is both one of the most fun and hard jobs that someone could possibly do. With the plethora of emotions, experiences, interests, and dislikes of each camper, I have learned so much already about patience, joy, and frustration in the work environment.
Being that my camp is only 20 minutes from my house, I have not yet noticed any stand-out structural inequalities regarding the children where I work. One fascinating thing I have found though, is that despite our similar experiences and interests, all of my coworkers and I come from different socioeconomic, racial, and religious backgrounds. Despite where we are all from, what we believe in, our ages, our home lives, and more, we all somehow winded up being a similar dissimilar mesh of people who get along so well.
I think the biggest divide between staffers is definitely our motivations for being at camp: teenagers who are just looking for summer work, and adults, some including teachers, who need the money to sustain themselves and their families. Knowing this definitely raises an interest within me, and sparks the question of why it is that people who educate us and our children are not paid more?
For my capstone, I would like to definitely reflect upon my time by a series of interactions with campers, other counselors, and then inner change I have realized. I would also like to use my CapStone to also talk about where I want to go next with my camp experience.
Being that I work at a Native-American specializing camp and I go to a school that does not have a Native American department or on-campus tribute to the Seminole community, I definitely want to do more research on the implementation of Native American history into American society; being that we are on native land.
As the picture shows, I’m going to keep on hanging in there, and I will see you all next week!
See you soon,
Nadia Soifer
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