Opinion Essay

College Composition

Opinion Essay

 

 

I love the summer camp I work for.... However, there are some things in the camp that should not be tolerated.

First off (and probably most importantly) Counseling is like parenting.  It’s a commitment and a sacrifice, not a way to get out of the bottom rungs of “staff-girl” or “staff-boy.”  You as a counselor are assigned a cabin full of kids that will be your responsibility for the week.  Tough?  Absolutely.  Seven seven-year-old girls or boys in one room is never easy.  But if you signed up to be a counselor, then you didn’t sign up for easy.  You signed up to take care of these kids, physically and emotionally, for the week.  You are supposed to want them to feel comfortable and happy.  You’re supposed to be here at thus Christian camp as a missionary, looking out for their souls.  Too often I see so-called counselors whose children could be anywhere, and they’re too busy flirting or socializing to care that their kids need them.  A good week of camp for a kid hangs on their counselor, and some of us just don’t make the cut.

That being said, what about those counselors who really are working hard?  What about the dependable ones who take no time for themselves during the day, and sometimes won’t get a good night’s sleep because their kids will wake up homesick, or flu-sick?  Budgeting has always been a problem, but being paid a maximum of $20 a week all summer is too little.  We can’t retain good counselors without paying them.  If we bumped up the salary, (by maybe not spending exorbitant amounts on horses all year long, or on climbing walls that the kids rarely climb) then maybe we could afford good counselors that had better focus and purpose.

This next one should be very straight-forward.  If you’re dating, don’t sneak off.  And keep your hands to yourselves!  If you’re looking for a utopian summer with your special someone, don’t commit to working 24/6 at a summer camp; it just doesn’t work.  Your focus should be on the kids, not on watching your significant other’s eyelashes.  This past summer, I hated walking into the laundry mat and ramming the door into a couple who quickly put themselves back together after an obvious make-out session.  What if I had been a kid?  This is supposed to be a godly environment, can’t we at least act like we're trying to support that?

What about the wilderness department?  Why the terrible divide between the wilderness program and the base camp?  Yes, I get the past.  The guy who started the wilderness program was a difficult man to get along with and he didn’t want to be associated with the main camp.  But he’s gone now.  He’s been gone for three years, for goodness sake!  Why aren’t we unified?  When we get back from a trip we unpack, wash the dishes, vacuum tents, clean equipment, put away equipment, and so on, all by ourselves.  It takes us long into the night and through the next days!  Meanwhile, some staff is often bored down at the main campsite.  If we all pitched in then we could be done in one night and those of us who are already exhausted at the end of the trip could be finished after one day.  Wilderness people help base camp, why not return the favor and live as one in perfect harmony? 

What about the cows??  I could go on and on about the cows.  Around the bend and up the road from the camp lives a bunch of cows.  A good chunk of the staff boy’s time is spent on making hay to feed the cows.  However, the cows don’t belong to the camp, they belong to the camp director’s son.  This is wrong.  Not everybody has connected the dots to see what this means, but if they did then they would see that this is totally the director’s son working the system.  Now I’m not saying that hard work isn’t good for these young men.  I absolutely agree with hard labor as a way of building character.  But what kind of character is he modeling to these kids?  He’s teaching them to cheat and to steal.  If he wants them to hay for him, then he needs to offer to pay them at least minimum wage, and he needs to observe every law about child labor.  If people got wind of this, we could get in serious trouble. 

The camp is doing a lot right, but through time the squeaky-clean system has been dirtied.    Maybe it all goes back to the fact that they aren’t budgeting to pay their workers well, and because of that they feel like they can’t enforce rules and restrictions.  They’re probably right, if they tightened things up then they might lose help.  But wouldn’t it be better to run a tight ship with scanty help, rather than allow some of this stuff to go on?