You Open The Window, And You Wait For The Breeze

at the camp where i'm a counselor, the red flag is reserved for incoming campers who will, for some reason or another, require more attention or even potentially create problems for people around them. the reasons for a red flag can vary, from behavioral problems, to a past history of violence or giving counselors trouble, to even physical or emotional syndromes. it's not unusual for bunks at camp, which have 12 campers each, to have 1 or 2 kids with red flags.

so that's why, when our 2 week session started this past sunday, we were a bit concerned when 8 of our 11 campers were labeled as red flags. this bunk was actually so potentially problematic that they switched me into a different unit in camp so that i and another veteran counselor could be with the bunk. when i heard, i was excited, because i felt like it was a huge honor. and also, of course, a huge challenge.

here are some of the bunk stats: two of our kids have aspberger's, a form of autism. about 4 or 5 have add or adhd. one is in therapy for anxiety. another has minor physical cerebral palsy. one is in therapy for anger management, and was just kicked out of school and is currently living with his aunt, who forced him to come to camp. oh yeah, and he's one of two black kids in a pretty much all white, all jewish camp. another kids is catholic. and two of the kids, upon arriving, kept asking if they could be switched from our bunk, or alternately, things you could do to get kicked out of camp and sent home.

fast forward now to tuesday. day two of the session. camp, where so much happens in one day, makes two days feel like you've been here a very long time. the first couple days were a definite struggle. i was in a state of constant awareness, making sure the kids with aspberger's weren't wandering off, making sure there were no fights, both emotional and physical. trying to steer some of the kids away from their general mode of being hurtful and disrespectful.

so our first block of the day was rockhopping along the river. very physically challenging. i forgot to mention that one of the kids with aspbergers, eric, is 12 years old and clocks in at 6 foot four, 250 pounds. all of us had rock hopped ahead, and as we looked back at eric, we see him take a huge fall. the lifeguard manages to pull him up and eric is sitting, hunched over. and then spontaneously, less from one kid and more from some spirit of love and compassion and unity that had been brewing unseen, erupts the most beautiful thing i had heard all day, maybe all month: "Eric, Eric, Eric." All the kids are cheering, yelling, for this strange, removed, unusual looking kid who was slowing them down, yelling for him to get up, yelling that he could do it. Oh my, it was beautiful. Aaron and I, the counselors, exchanged an amazed look.

and then fast forward a bit more to tuesday night, last night. we had been hopeful about the group all day, and we took them on a trust walk, where they line up single file with their eyes closed and hands on each others' shoulders, and walk around camp. the point is to trust the person in front of you. at one point, james, the kid with the anger management, said, "i don't trust anyone in this group." eric asked us to stop because he felt uncomfortable. i've been trying to remove the word failure from my vocab, but it sure felt like it.

i sat us in a circle in the grass to debrief. it was twilight, that transitionary time of day that always seems a bit magical to me. i said to the kids, how did that feel? what made it hard? and after a couple insightful comments, sai, one of the kids with aspbergers, obsessed with fictional tree warriors and sometimes making uncontrollable grunts, says just quietly enough for us to hear, "i have aspbergers."

i wish you could have been there. come with me for a second to a patch of grass right outside of the national park, in a two week camp with eleven 13 and 14 year olds, 8 of them labeled "red flags" by camp. sit in the circle as sai adams quietly tells a group of his peers, kids he has known for 48 hours, "i have aspbergers."

when we sit in the circle and have conversations, i like to tell the kids that the circle is a special way to sit and talk. a circle is unbroken, continuous. it creates a space for everyone to be held, to be trusting with one another, to say things like i have aspbergers to a group of kids who you don't even know how they they'll respond. i titled this "you open the window and you wait for the breeze." the circle is the open window. you create a space for these 11 kids, so many of whom have labels, who have been pigeonholed into a certain way of thinking and doing and being, and you let them be. you wait for the breeze to pass through, and when it does, you let it brush your face and your arms and your body and you say thank you for special moments like this.

so sai told the group what he had, and mitchell followed by telling the group he also had aspbergers. then matthew told the group he had cerebral palsy. and some kids talked about having adhd. they shared what it was like to live with these different things, the challenges they faced. matthew told the group he could only run a 12 minute mile on his best day because of his cerebral palsy, and the group gave a sympathetic moan. and they all listened like i had never heard them listen before, kids who sometimes couldn't make it through a 30 second round of instructions.

every bunk at camp has a theme. the theme aaron and i created was, "yes we can." we thought it was pretty funny, given that bob the builder and obama, and many civil rights groups, have adopted it as their mantra. i don't think we realized how appropriate it was for this group of kids. and at the end of our circle, when we got up, with everyone holding onto the magical talking shoe, and yelled out together "yes we can" at the top of our lungs, i learned again that the kids are always teaching me more than i'm teaching them. i learned that if they can, then i can, and you can, and we all can. no matter if we have aspbergers, cerebral palsy, depression, or just a plain bad day.

thank you for reading this, and for being a part of my circle.

love,
ryan