Weekend at Camp

My conversational Spanish got a work-out this past weekend! 

As a family pal, I was paired with folks from Guatemala at the Painted Turtle Family Camp Weekend for Rheumatic Diseases. Three kids, aged 12, 9 and 8, and three adults - mom, dad and auntie - kept me hopping with delight and scurrying to retrieve much of my forgotten High School Spanish.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an equal opportunity destroyer - as are many other auto-immune diseases. Little “N”, the eight year old, had painfully swollen knobby joints and diminished use of his hands. Even so, he was able quickly to master the single handed rope trick my husband empowered me to teach. N was delighted and so proud to ‘learn and earn’ a rope to take home. His nine year old cousin “O” almost got it down, but his impulsivity made it difficult to stick with it long enough to master and remember the trick, so this was the one area during the weekend where N got to shine. The well cousin threw himself head first into every activity during the weekend, leaving N behind on the ropes course, archery and fishing.

We Family Pals begin our duties by meeting and greeting the newly-arrived families up on “cabin row.”  Typically, they arrive between 5pm and 7pm - in time for Pizza and salad. We help with luggage, get them settled and escort them to the Well Shell (mini hospital) for photo and registration. After dinner there is a “camp fire” (also in the dining hall) where schedule, safety rules and protocols are revealed with hilarious skits to illustrate the fine points. Friday night ends with families going off to their cabins and volunteers and staff meeting to plan out the rest of the weekend. We get to bed before midnight - but just barely!

Saturday is a three-days-in-one kind of day. We begin with (optional) sunrise activities which include archery, boating and fishing, gym, wood shop and arts and crafts. My kids wanted to go fishing. We met at the dock and enjoyed the hilarity of a wild errant fish line issuing straight from the first-time-held-by-the-eight-year-old pole winding up in a tree along the shore. “Tree-Bass, anyone?” 

As it turned out, big sister “K” had taken a fall off the porch swing earlier and scraped up her wrist and elbow, so I left other adults in charge of the fishermen and accompanied her to the well-shell where she got treatment for her mild abrasions. During our walk we talked of the books she reads - nearly non-stop. I thought it a brilliant strategy for tuning out the world where she truly is “second banana” because her brother’s condition is so fragile. This is not to say that there’s no love for her there in her family. I witnessed closeness especially between mom and daughter. Attention necessarily must go to the squeaky wheel and K kept one step ahead of disappointment through page-turning marathons - even reading at the table all of Friday night and through two of Saturday’s meals. During our fifteen minute walk to the Well Shell, I learned a lot about all three of the Hunger Games books, The Twilight Series and other novels for young adults which she seemed to devour with relish and salt (tears). I felt privileged to be taken into her confidence.

Saturday also included an EGG-stravaganza (making a container for a raw egg which MAY prevent its breaking while it is dropped, slung from a catapult, run over by a utility cart or sent into space via an air-powered launching device) while the parents were meeting with a doc to have their questions answered about Lupus, RA, Scleroderma and related diseases. We also had a Carnival, Stage night and played with the kids while moms and dads attended Parents’ Cafe.

One way to empower kids is to plead ineptitude and have them correct and help me with my Spanish. K and her brother and cousin were more than eager to add to my vocabulary list and giggle at my attempts to translate for two other special guests for the weekend. In addition to the 28 families from all over the south west, The Painted Turtle hosted two staff members from a brand-new start-up camp in Paraguay.

Serious Fun is the newly minted name for the parent company for what were know as “The Association of Hole In The Wall Gang Camps”, of which The Painted Turtle is one. The staff person who accompanied Nilton and Gloria of Paraguay is named Haley and she just returned from Viet Nam and Cambodia where other sister camps are being established. 

Haley’s Spanish is more than serviceable and she translated nearly every word spoken from the stage for the entire weekend for Nilton and Gloria, so they could benefit from understanding the workings of the program.

The three were also assigned to the same family as I - bringing to 7:3 the ratio of adults to children for our group. There certainly was enough attention to go around! By Saturday night, K’s reading book was not at the table and she even got up to dance with me during the odd break-out dance sessions near the end of meals for Saturday lunch, dinner and Sunday Brunch. 

Truly, I loved conversing, fishing, witnessing arrows hitting targets, young horsemen riding steeds, and courageous boys climbing fifty feet up to rickety platforms and tight ropes, then zipping down the line with glee. One of my new vocabulary phrases is “Estoy orgullosa de ti.” It means, “I am proud of you.”

Perhaps Paraguay is on our itinerary for some future camp experience. For now, I am content to dream about next weekend’s open house for The Painted Turtle and recuperate from this weekend!