All's Well That Ends Well

We sang, we cried and during the scariest electrical storm I've ever seen, we said goodbye to our second session campers and to the end of Appel Farm 2011.

Staff Week seems like an age ago and yet camp has gone by so fast this year. It feels like just yesterday that Molly and I were driving across the country to get here, talking about and anticipating the coming summer. Now it is over. The children have gone home and the only proof I have that this summer ever existed are a collection of ceramic mugs I threw on the wheel and the momentos I've horded from the beginning of the summer, not to mention the beginning of my travels.

But those momentos - poetry I've written, letters given to me, cards and notes passed between friends, costume pieces from camp dances, worthless gifts from my campers that would mean nothing to anybody else, but have become more important than any of the things I've bought for myself in the last year. I have carried a binder full of this - stuff - for 12 months and as I crammed even more into it yesterday, I was reminded of the full length of my travels. I really have been gone for a long time.

Technically, camp is not over yet. The staff remain here for two more days - to clean and inevitably, party - but the 'camp' part that makes it camp has finished. Yesterday, as I hugged my last eight girls goodbye - Candace, Angela, Leah, Sarah, Jen, Ace, and Haley and Katie who have been in my bunk for eight weeks - I could only hope that I had left them with a few nuggets of truth and a sense of self-worth that they will remember about me and this summer for the rest of their lives. It's almost ridiculous how much you fall in love with these kids. It's only after two months of getting frustrated with them not cleaning up after themselves and aggravated that they never listen or angry that they want to be treated like adults but are acting like children, that you realise how much you love them and have come to consider them your own children.

Ciao for now. xo

The Second Helping

I have lived in Australia for 23 years and in those 23 years, I have suffered through some pretty horrific hot summers. But I have never been as hot and disgusting as I have in the last few days.

First session ended just in time for eastern America to suffer one of the worst heat waves in the last five years. 24 people in the New York City tri-state area died due to heat-related emergencies. The mercury hit 105 degrees - a very comfortable 40 degrees on the celcius scale. My eyelids were sweating. The air itself was too heavy to breathe. Even the air conditioning struggld to turn what was toxic humidity into bearable indoor spaces.

Thankfully, the worst day we indured was the day the first session campers left so by midday they had all returned to the safety of their air-conditioned realities. So we didn't have to endure the additional blight of the over-heated child.

As much as I loved my first session bunk and the energy and eccentricities they brought to our domestic dynamic, it was a relief when intersession swooped in. I found this session hard-going at times - faced with issues and challenges that luck never brought me as a counselor last year. But the moments when I questioned my abilities to deal with the teenage issues I was faced with daily, where utterly outweighed by the moments my girls made me laugh or needed my advice or just a hug or I realised how much their trust was my ultimate support.. It is so easy as a counselor to think that your campers think of you the way they do their parents - as buzzkillers, the man, their authority - but when their crying in your arms on the last day and revealing how their summer was what it was because you were their counselor, there's no greater assurance that you did your job. And then some.

The 36-hours of intersession were spent re-setting camp for the impending second session campers. We cleaned our bunk from floor to ceiling. We re-designed our bunk decorations and we all took a moment to breathe (or try to in the heat). After a night of celebration our survival, a bunch of us went to Parvin Park - a local lake in a nearby national forrest, where we 'grilled' (aka BBQ'd) and swam with the other 100 locals who fled the heat for the water.

Then we returned to camp to do it all over again.

Second session is an interesting experience. It can feel like a relief to have everything feel comfortable and familiar but the monotony can be a buzz killer. But at the end of the day, you quickly realise - these are a new bunch of kids with a new set of issues.

Ciao for now. xo

One Down, One To Go

There is one more sleep until the end of the first session of 2011 and four weeks could not have gone faster. I remember camp dragging by beautifully last year. This year, it has flown by and it's uncomfortable to be staring down at the last four weeks, knowing that I am going to be at the end of them faster than I would like.

Week Four at Appel Farm is kicked off with our Dinner Dance, where the girls primp and preen like its the prom and the boys couldn't care less. For the counselors, it's an opportunity to remember the days where a boy asking you the dance was on par with a marriage proposal and where the response, "I'm going with my friends" meant something else entirely.

While the campers may get dressed up, it's the counselors who truly get 'dressed up'. The theme of First Session Dinner Dance was 'Sock Hop', also known as 50s. Being an arts camp, you can only imagine the amount of times we have all seen Grease, so we knew what we were doing when it came to looking like Sandra D - both before and after. The one thing I learnt at college was how to make a circle-skirt, so I was put in charge of making the poodle-skirts for the Appel Angels - our version of the Pink Ladies.

Needless to say, despite all our attempts to teach the kids to jive to the 50s music, all they really wanted to do was make bump-and-grind lines to Beyonce.

Classes officially ended on Tuesday so the remainder of the week is availabe for performances. This is one of my favourite parts of camp - watching the kids perform and be recognised for the work they've put in over the last three weeks. At the end of the day, it's pretty incredible what the theatre, technical theatre, music, dance, video and visual artists achieve in the time available to them. And don't get me started on the creative writers...

Tonight is the last night of camp which means it will be an emotional one. There is a whole closing ceremony organised for the kids involving candles and singing and a lot of tears. But it gives them a sense of closure to all they've experienced in our Utopia.

Then we wipe away their tears and send them off to the final campfire, where they get high on s'mores and make out with each other.

Ciao for now. xo

You-Make-Me Feel Like I'm Living a Teen-age-Dream

Firstly, welcome to those of you joining us from the IEP Summer Camp website. My contact at IEP (my sponsor organisation in Australia) emailed me last week and asked if I would be comfortable with IEP posting a link to my blog on their official website. Um, a chance for more online traffic? Need I respond to that at all?

So welcome all ye new readers. I hope this blog gives you the insight into camp life that I eagerly sort after and failed to find when I was in your position 12 months ago.

Once again, the busy camp schedule has gotten the better of me and my blogging has suffered. Between the 4th of July celebrations, Beach Day, International Day, the Camp Dance and all the 16-year-old angst-enriched drama that happens in between all that, I haven't had the time to do anything but drink A LOT of bad cafeteria-style joe (that's American-drawl for coffee.)

And believe me, the drama is as thick and volumous as Fabio's chest hair. I swear, put a video camera in front of these teenagers and you've got yourselves an MTV reality show to be reckoned with. I don't remember it all being so hard when I was a teenager, but apparently, solving the issues between teenagers is like trying to declare world peace.

When I'm not stopping nuclear warheads from exploding and leaving only the cockroaches behind to rebuild the world, I'm teaching my brilliant creative writing minds and becoming continually more jealous of their abilities. My break-through this week, which put all other teenage dramas on the back burner, was when one of my younger writers who I often have to battle with to be a part of the class, wrote a poem that he wants to read on-stage at the upcoming Friday Nigh Concert. I had to physically stop myself from hugging him and making the kid feel completely uncomfortable.

When I'm not finding refuge in those small achievements teaching brings, I'm continuing to establish myself as the counselor with no shame when it comes to being utterly ridiculous. We all know KH does not do things by halves and camp aggravates that tendency in me. At International Day, I brainwashed poor American children into eating Vegemite, at the Outer Space-inspired Camp Dance I turned myself into a hunk of space junk and screamed and squealed my way through every rollercoaster at Six Flags during Trip Day. Just in case the campers doubted my dedication to shame, I dressed up as a grandma for Reverse Day and coughed and spluttered over every child who would get close enough to me.

You know... sacrificing my squeaky clean reputation all in the aid of making children laugh.

Ciao for now. xo

The Kids Are Alright

It's been a week since the kids arrived at camp and this is the first opportunity I've had not only to sit down and blog, but sit down and write my unloved mother an email. I've been a little side-tracked by all things camp.

After spending seven days with the 2011 staff, it can feel like camp is just going to consist of the counselors and no one else. But once the kids arrive, the whole camp suddenly comes alive and it feels like the summer is really in full swing.

The girls in my bunk are an absolute riot and a completely different batch of girls from last year. Most of them are returners and feel more comfortable at camp than they do in their own homes. They like to talk about boys and Justin Bieber and their favourite brands of make-up and they try to unsuccessfully pry details about our personal lives out of us. They've created a completely different bunk vibe from my girls last year, which has helped in distinguishing one summer from another. Sometimes, they're so on the go that just watching them, let alone counseling them, sucks the energy right out of me. But for the most part, I love each of them and  will be very sad when they leave me at the end of the first four-week session.

This week has been all about the bonding. Having campers move into your bunk is like giving birth to a baby. You have to spend as much time as possible with them in those first few days of camp  in order to truly establish a relationship. Because my girls are desperate to know every single thing about me, that hasn't been a problem. We've made music together, talked about boys together, braided each other's hair and talked about the economical benefits of buying cheap nail polish versus the physical benefit of using expensive nail polish when the cheap nail polish cracks your cuticals.

But this first week hasn't just been about the campers. In my downtime, those couple of minutes where I find myself suddenly free, I head straight to the baby-grand and let some of the summer stress loosen on the ivories. I played in the counselor concert and despite having played so many gigs in the last eight months, I felt strangely nervous about being back on the Appel Farm stage, playing my own music. Somehow, that stage represents so much more to me than any other stage I've performed on this year.

After two weeks of being at camp, I finally had the day off today. A few friends (some old, some new) and I went to Philadelphia for the night, a trip which has left me more tired than when I left. But it was nice to be back in the city and feeling like a person with her own life, rather than being immersed in the lives of her campers.

Almost makes me a little homesick for Sydney.

Ciao for now. xo

Fight Club

It frightens me how quickly time is passing by. We are already at the end of our first week of Session 2!

And I've only written 16 blogs in that time - what have I been doing with my time?

The first week of camp has been great - a little tiring as it's a constant struggle to keep up with the energy of the 2nd session campers. They're like Energizer bunnies that never die! Thankfully, because they are so different from my first group, I haven't been comparing them or struggling to move on from the intersession.

As a way of helping us come together as the new Bunk 22, Thursday night evening activities was Bunk Activities - an opportunity for us to mix and interact with our new roommates. Molly (my co-counselor) and I organised an Appel Farm tradition which was met with both delight and disgust by our group of girls - shaving cream fight.

This involves getting in your 'swim suit' (togs just confuses them) and spraying/flinging/slapping/covering each other in shaving cream until you are coated like an iced cup cake.

And surprisingly, shaving cream is quite a maliable substance. Once it's in your hair, there's no limit to what you can do with it.

80 percent of our girls thought this activity was genius and ran around like crazed snowmen. The other 20 percent, who had already showered and put on a face of makeup in anticipation of seeing the Bunk 26 boys, looked on in fear that at any moment they might be attacked.

It all felt like a throw-back to my old college days (although without the alcohol and probably nudity which would have ensued.)

Ciao for now. xo

Reflections, Perceptions

As I meet the end of the third week of camp, it feels surreal to know that I have been in America for over a month.

On one hand, it feels like that time has sped by. On the other, if feels like I can account for ever day of those four weeks. New York feels like an eternity ago, Staff Week seems like a distant memory and it feels like I have known ever person I have met so far, for forever. I feel comforted by the thought that there is still so much to come – another month – and that it too might meet me slowly and steadily like the one that has just passed. But beyond that awaits a sting, one I can’t bring myself to consider just yet.


Time here is strange, like camp exists and operates in its own world. You feel both conscious and unconscious of it slowly passing you by. With that, comes a motivation to seize every opportunity to live and love and perform, just as the campers do.

I continue to be blown away by the talent of the kids that attend Appel Farm – their creativity and ambition – and I am envious of the innocence and naivety they have towards the world and the role they will have in it as creative practitioners. But I have also been saddened by some of their lives - children who have been thrust into adulthood against their will, who have seen things and survived things which will haunt them forever. Behind their faces are broken homes and burnt innocence. And in their eyes, the sweet relief of knowing Appel Farm can be their refuge.

I came to America expecting the stereotype, awaiting the summer camp experience I have seen on TV. And I’ve had it, I continue to have it, but nothing prepared me for the realism. Camp is more than smores and bunk beds and poison ivy. It’s a time for kids to be kids, to escape the outside world (as good or bad as it may be for them) and revel in four weeks of unadulterated kid time. Where they get the attention they deserve and the fun they seek and the encouragement they crave.

Ciao for now. xo