June 6, 2008

I had a chance to speak with a volunteer doctor this morning who is currently working at Yale and he was pretty amazed at this summer experience. He mentioned I should definitely apply to Dartmouth, Yale, and Cornell for medical school and expressed how they really value applicants with experiences like I have had.

After breakfast we had a few meetings and the camp director was a great speaker/motivator and got everyone super excited that the campers were coming today. The theme for the week is Jungle Junction and the camp seems very dedicated to the theme. This week I am in the Yellow unit with mostly 12-14 year olds.

Y- E- Double L- O – W- you know you wanna be Yellow (figured I’d throw a little cheer in there).

The campers are AWESOME! We have campers from the Bronx, Philly, NYC, Connecticut, Canada, and Russia (it’s international week). This week other campers will be coming from Ireland, Italy, and Germany so it should be interesting with everything having to be translated into all of these languages. It is a general illness session so our campers have a wide variety of illnesses such as Leukemia, Brain tumor, Hemophilia, liver transplant, and cancer.

Its like night and day compared to last week in that the campers seem so independent. After playing some board games we went to Adventure with our cabin this afternoon. The campers were blind folded and led through a trail in the woods and had lots of bonding games. It was amazing how well the kids worked together.
After dinner and a fire drill we had a “camp fire” in the Theater where there were lots of non-verbal skits/magic and camp info to accommodate everyone. We played a game of silent ball once the campers got ready for bed and had a deep cabin chat. A few campers expressed how they lost a parent within the last year and are looking forward to putting it behind them through this camp. Despite the various backgrounds of these campers they all seem so well mannered.