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I went to a week-long Christian summer camp for five or six years when I was a kid. Despite the fact that by the last time I went, I had stopped believing in Christianity (my mom forced me to go that year because she had already paid the deposit), it was still pretty fun. It's a really high-budget camp because it's been around awhile (my mom and her brothers attended when they were kids). On the first day you'd check into your cabin (which had relatively comfortable bunk beds, fully equipped bathrooms, and chillingly cold AC) meet your cabin mates, say goodbye to your parents, and then go to the meeting hall for orientation. You would pick four activities to do during the week, with the first two on Tuesday and Wednesday and the other two on Thursday and Friday. I usually picked archery, arts and crafts, "nature" (which consisted of taking walks around the camp and spending time in this building which housed various animals like snakes, snapping turtles, guinea pigs/rabbits, and one year, some baby alligators), and once I was old enough, sail boating (we just got to ride around the lake on open catamarans which was dope as hell). Every day there would be several activities that the entire age group would do. Stuff like swimming in the camp's pool, going to the camp's roller skating rink, massive water/mud fights (team based), square dances in the meeting hall, "theater nights" where the counselors would put on funny skits for us, and usually on one night during the week we would play manhunt once it got dark. All this stuff was super fun even though personally I never really made friends at camp because I was pretty introverted. However, as it was a bible camp, each day was peppered with religious meetings of various lengths. Devotion at dawn (15 min), chapel in the evening (about 1.5 hrs or so), and small group 3-4 times a day (30-45 min each time). The small group meetings were the most annoying ones because the counselors were supposed to be teaching us from some curriculum which was boring as hell and they knew it, so by the end of the week they would give up and let us play games like graveyard (where everyone lays on the ground without moving or making noise and one person goes around and tries to make the "dead people" move or laugh without touching them) instead. We also prayed before meals, after "quiet time" (the hour after lunch where we went back to the cabins to nap or read), and had a more personal devotional before bed with our cabin group and counselors, who would afterwards send us to our beds and walk around to do a short prayer with each kid. The counselors were at least 18 but none of them were much older than that. You could attend as a camper until the year you graduated high school, so I'm not sure who the counselors for the high school camp were. Maybe college students. I never really noticed any questionable fraternization between the counselors but all of them were seriously religious. We got three hots a day and the food was surprisingly good for the volume of kids and counselors that had to be fed. It was not family-style like I've heard is the case at most camps; you went through a line like in a school cafeteria. I was a vegan for a couple years and the cooks were extremely accommodating and would make special dishes for me and the other veg kids. If you had to take medicine on a regular basis you would get called out a few minutes before each meal was over and go to the camp clinic to take them. If you happened to get a headache and your mom hadn't signed in any Advil or whatever for you at the clinic, tough poo poo, they couldn't administer anything that wasn't given to them by the parents. Better hope you didn't get a cold because you'd be blowing your nose into toilet paper for a week. Outdoors it was ungodly humid and the mosquitoes were killer. The cabins would always have massive spider webs with a dozen of these on each one so you couldn't walk to close to any buildings. The lake was full of gators. But there was a really beautiful illuminated cross on the lake as well, and on the last night of camp at the chapel meeting the pastor would get all serious and ask everyone to devote their lives to Jesus and the curtains were pulled back from a bay window behind the pulpit so the cross could be seen. It always ended with a bunch of kids sobbing like that scene in Jesus Camp (although Methodists don't speak in tongues). The next day we would wake up, go to devotion, meet up with our parents and go to breakfast. Then you would try to convince your mom to buy you poo poo from the gift store before heading home. Anyway, that's my extremely in-depth description of summer camp. I haven't thought about it in awhile, thanks for posting so I could reminisce.
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Apr 15, 2015 19:27
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 11:38 |
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