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.
I’m approaching the end of week seven and with just over one short week left at Appel Farm, the cruel realisation that this experience will soon be coming to an end is starting to really affect me.
It feels like I have been here forever, that I didn’t have a life before coming to camp and with that comes a fear for what waits beyond next Saturday – when I wave goodbye to my Appel Farm family, these people I have learnt to trust with my faith and my fears, these people who I may never see again but have been players in this beautiful memory of mine.
And then I watch some kid super-gluing his fingers to a table in the Art Barn and I know I’ve had just about my fill.
With second session starting to wind down to Performance Week (the week all the kids perform their work from the session) as well as the camp itself closing, Appel Farm seems to have been hit by a contrast of extremities. The campers are wearing out, the counsellors are wearing out and now our sheer fatigue seems to have turned into eccentricity. It seems not even exhaustion can slow my girls down.
As the second session schedule is a repeat of the first session, early last week we held our second International Day. However, this time it was centred on the International vs. America soccer game – the only occasion in the Appel Farm calendar when the counsellors and campers are allowed (or more so, encouraged) to act competitively. This game is a HUGE deal and as you can imagine, a camp for performing arts never does anything by halves, even when it comes to sports. There are strategy meetings, coaching, training, warm-ups, referees, rules, red cards, water coolers, commentators, cheer teams and a whole lot of male ego going wayward. The International team is made up of all the international counsellors (primarily British, who as you can imagine, feel they have a point to prove) and the American team is made up of all the Americans (who being American, also feel they have a point to prove). While the Internationals were victorious in the first session match, we did not fair so lucky in the second session where a sneaky goal in the final minutes of overtime saw us beaten by the red, white and blue – and they haven’t let us forget it. All in all though, a good excuse to dress up in as much Australian paraphernalia as I could bring with me and roll my eyes at the children who asked me what language I speak in Australia.
One activity I missed out on in first session due to my day off but got to experience this week was overnight camping – an Appel Farm tradition where your bunk and another bunk traipse out into the middle of the field across the road and camp for the night. For a 22-year-old who spent much of her childhood sleeping on a blow-up mattress in the middle of nowhere, one evening of overnight camping didn’t phase me much (especially when there were smores involved). For a group of 16-year-olds who couldn’t bear the idea of bugs, flat beds and sleeping bags, overnight camping appeared apocalyptic. But with a few smores in their belly and the only beetles being the Beatles hits we sang around the campfire, I think they survived with most of their sanity in check.
Friday night brought the first dance for the session and the first opportunity for our camper couples to test out how much bumping-and-grinding they could get away with before intervened by the counsellors. The theme for the Friday Night dance was Pirates and Mermaids and not feeling like dancing with a fish tail between my legs, I went, instead, as a pirate’s parrot. Thankfully, the camp costume shop comes in handy for events like this and just so happened to have a meticulously detailed parrot costume waiting for me to use. A beak, a pirate patch and some extensive eye make-up later and I was ready to dance the night away (between the bumps-and-grinds).
Being at a performing arts camp has been a pretty humbling experience. The sheer talent of the campers I am surrounded by and being privy to the unadulterated passion they have for their art form has been inspiring. This being so, I’ve taken a deep breath and returned to the stage. I performed a few times in first session – singing and playing an original piece on the piano and fronting the jazz/funk band’s rendition of Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag. And on Monday night, I took up my guitar and accompanied a friend’s first performance on the piano. Playing on stage again has really stirred something in me and it’s one thing I’ll definitely miss once camp is over. Below is the YouTube video of our performance - Imagine.
The leadership team like to keep us and the campers on our toes, so yesterday they sent the camp schedule into mayhem by hosting Reverse Day. When your day-to-day existence comes to rely on the mechanical comfort of a routine, suddenly flipping it upside down leaves you feeling the strange effects of vertigo. We had dinner for breakfast, evening activities in the morning, majors in the afternoon, breakfast for dinner and early-bird activities in the evening, where we sat around drinking coffee and reading the paper.
On Sunday, the American's got to celebrate their country. On Monday, it was the foreigner's turn.
Evening Activities at Appel Farm was International Day - an evening reserved for flaunting (and fabricating) all that is fantastic about one's own country. There is a pretty strong international contingent at Appel Farm with counselors from Australia (of course), Wales, England, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa.
I am one of three very proud Aussies who donned our Australia flag along with plenty of green and gold to represent Down Under. The idea was that each group representing a country was spread out around camp to represent 'the world' and bunks of campers had to visit each country with their 'passport'. When they 'landed' via bubble boat or bubble plane, we taught them about our country, stamped their passport and sent them on to the next country.
I am constantly surprised by how little American's know about our country. They honestly believe we ride kangaroos to school and they look in horror when we say that the majority of the time, the kangaroos end up splattered across the dented front of your bonnet. They have no idea what our flag looks like and that we are still a part of the Queen's Commonwealth.
But what really made the evening was watching in joy as they tasted vegemite. Their greedy eyes saw what looked like chocolatey-Nutella smeared across slices of bread but when that strong, salty Vegemite goodness hit their taste buds, they realised it doesn't taste like Nutella at all. This was all hilarious, until they started spitting perfectly good vegemite sandwiches into the garden.
And of course, we taught them the national anthem.
