Camp Updates

We are second week into camp and boy has it been an adventure! So far we’ve managed to survive a flu attack (my partner unfortunately got sick and had to miss most of the first week as well as set-up) and a water shortage. There is no inter-connecting piping system in the town; each house is an independent plumbing unit. Water is delivered several times by a truck, and that same truck also literally sucks out all the sewage from the house through a pipe. And you do not want to be around any sinks or toilets when that happens, since all the smell is lifted into the air. (I learned from experience.) During the time that we’ve lived in this house, water ran out twice –even once while I was in the middle of shampooing my hair. I had to wait until I got to the office to rinse out the dried-up crusty shampoo residue in the bathroom sink.

Camp is going spectacularly well, although we’ve had a few ups and downs. The kids are generally very enthusiastic about everything, especially gym time. In the past few days, we’ve made sure that they do lots of running in gym time just to wear off their energy to a manageable level. A typical day starts with quiet reading time and one or two group circle games. We then divide the group into two, one subgroup stays with Patrick and me for English literacy activities while the other subgroup learns Inuktitut from the local leaders. The subgroups then switches the next day. Then everyone goes to the gym for some active games, followed by a nutritious snack, and finally by a craft.

In regards to the literacy activities- with the younger camp, we’ve done group readings, writing exercises (such as writing a sentence related to the story, and then drawing a picture), spelling relay-races with magnetic letters on the whiteboard, and reading comprehension trivia games. The older campers have seen an array of literacy-based games such as Scattergories, Boggle, and spelling relays, as well as group readings. Moving forward, we will be directing the older camp more towards writing skill-building, since that is the area that appears to be lacking in our campers. We plan to accomplish this by creative writing exercises, “words of the day”, book-making, and perhaps letter-writing to the literacy camps in other localities. The younger campers will probably be divided into two groups based on skill levels and age– since the campers range from Grade 1 to Grade 5. The younger group will probably focus more on phonics and word-recognition while the older group can be directed towards more rigorous reading and writing tasks.

In the room I’m staying in, there hangs poster with the following quote – “Time is not measured by clocks, but by moments.” Indeed this sums up my camp experience so far – it is the moments that make my day. Moments such as having kids begging to stay longer after the day ends, seeing kids fighting over who gets to read the next page of the story book to the group, and even watching a girl break down in tears and tell me that she “sometimes just feels lonely” – knowing that she trusts me enough to tell me that. The moments are worth all the logistical nightmares, the strenuous planning, and yes, even the shampoo disasters.