Personal Narrative: To Kill A Mockingbird Camp Experience

During the summer, I go to Girl Scout camp and work as a counselor-in-training. We shadow counselors, teach little girls how to perform flag, organize and perform the weekly campfire, and lead camp songs, among other things. When I was younger, my favorite part of camp was none of those things. Instead, it was the interactions with the older girls and counselors-- I wanted to be just like them. I followed them around and managed the younger girls in an attempt to seem responsible and told them proudly of my straight A’s and camping trips where I’d, “done all this fire-making stuff before.” I couldn’t get the fire lit in the aftermath of that unfortunate boast, but I used two entire boxes of matches trying to light a fire just last summer, so I can forgive my eight-year-old self.
As I’ve aged my camp experience has grown up with me. My premature bouts with responsibility turned into real responsibility somewhere, and I became someone that little me’s follow around, on the way to the lake and the tennis courts and a better adulthood. It makes me wonder-- do other counselors feel the same yawning responsibility when a girl shyly admits that her favorite song is the donkey song, and would I please sing it before dinner tonight? When girls call them to set up hula hoop houses or play a
game of double dutch with them? When a girl who was crying her eyes out a minute earlier is climbing up the ladder to the zip line platform just because I told her, “You’ll be okay,” and, “It’s really fun, I promise, just try it”?
I’m sure they do. They must. I can’t possibly wrap my head around a world in which the power we have over these children is not so blatantly obvious as to feel it in every interaction; I know for me those early brushes with a positive authority indelibly imprinted themselves on me. My very first day of camp, the table head asked if I had had enough to eat, and, even though said yes and I hadn’t, her concern and easy caring stayed with me for seven years, and now I can’t leave the table without checking with each girl that she’s had enough before she leaves. I am always sure to check with each girl to make sure she’s having a good time, especially if she’s never been to camp. To make sure that she knows that this space and these people are here for her regardless of who she is or what she’s coming from. And, isn’t that the whole point of being a Girl Scout? That unconditional acceptance and support? Perhaps this seems extraneous to the story at hand, my first day at camp during dinner, but I know, both as a camper and a counselor, that the little things sometimes make the biggest difference, afford the greatest help. There is no excuse not to extend these kindnesses.
And of course, there are those who don’t. The head wrangler my first week of camp yelled at me for fifteen minutes behind the dining hall because my shoes had holes in them to let water pass through and as such were, “unsafe,” even though they broke no stated camp rules. She forced me to wear tennis shoes that were too small and gave me blisters the size of grapes, and I, in turn, avoided anything to do with horses for nearly five years-- she hadn’t even related to the topic to horses. I was so malleable at that age as to be put off an entire field of activity because of one bad experience with authority.
That’s really the point I’m getting at here-- authority, and how authority is such an essential part of how children grow up and end up.
It’s a concept I find easy to put into context within the confines of summer camp, but children are no more affected by counselors than they are by teachers and youth pastors and parents, even older children. We all have a responsibility. There will always be kids who find it easy to brush off the failings of adults, but there will also always be the kids like me, who cried when adults raised their voice and wanted nothing but their attention even then. They need us to be the best versions of ourselves. We need us to be the best versions of
ourselves.
Ultimately, as the people with all the power, we all have all the responsibility as well. That’s really all it comes down to.