Routine With No Routine

The Summer between High School and College I worked at an the overnight Summer camp for the mentally and physically disabled - where I would work for the next 4 Summers. I had never worked with any disabled person ever before.  During my first Summer working there I was still in High School when I started the week-long Counselor Training (I had to leave for a few hours one day to take a State Exam) and then rush back for more training.

The day I graduated High School was also the day the first campers arrived for my first camp session ever. Despite my telling both the Camp Director and the Assistant Camp Director that I had my Graduation on that day they had me scheduled for Taps that night (Taps is when 2 counselors had to spend the night in each cabin to take the campers to the bathroom, change their wet clothes and their bedding and make sure they didn't flee into the woods or have behavior issues at night) as well as I had to bribe another counselor in my cabin to take my 2 campers along with their own 2 campers while I walked across the stage and graduated. 

So I got up early had a quick pre-Graduation get-together with my Parents, relatives and some friends and then went to my Graduation - which took several hours since there were several hundreds of students in my class. I then had to rush back to camp meet my first-ever campers, do the different activities including a camp fire (sing songs like "An Old Austrian”) and then had to spend my Graduation night not at a cool party, but cleaning up bathroom messes, wet bedsheets, quieting screaming campers and stopping one camper whose behaviors made them beat up on other people. Talk about being pushed into a pool and either sinking or swimming.

To make things more challenging I was assigned two campers (one in a manual wheelchair and one walker with known behaviors and who liked to run into the woods every chance they could.) Since you were not allowed to leave a camper by themselves at any time it was near-impossible to push the wheelchair from one activity to the next while at the same time chasing after the runner. To add to that I had to personally feed one camper for every meal (and he ate food with Thick-It in it) while the runner had to eat in a quiet place outside the mess hall so rather than eating myself (food for counselors was always scarce) I had to run between feeding one camper in the mess hall and checking on the runner eating at the picnic table outside the mess hall.  Going swimming was even more challenging since I had to use a lift to get my one camper into the pool and stay with him swimming while also watching the runner - who wasn't allowed to swim - but still loved to run into the woods. Also every 2 hours I had to change one camper while keeping an eye on the other camper.  On top of my two campers I also had to help out with all the other campers in my cabin (not only on Taps at night) but whenever a counselor in my cabin was on their 2 hour break every day. If you had Taps you worked 22 hours a day with only 2 hours off.

Needless to say I had a hard first week of running around with the wheelchair while constantly searching the camp and the woods for the runner camper, dealing with campers in my cabin whose behaviors included punching people and throwing things off the walls to use as weapons, finding clean laundry (there never seemed to be any for the campers - especially those that came from NYC with only the clothes on their backs), finding food to eat for myself – there was never enough for the counselors – and finding time to eat it was near-impossible.

I also had Taps 4 out of 5 days (working 22 hours each of those 4 days) – I was scheduled for 3 Taps, but took someone else’s Taps so they could celebrate their birthday (they took my Taps the next week so I could celebrate my birthday.)

While the first week of the first Summer I worked at Camp was over-whelming and chaotic I managed to find a routine despite being a camp counselor for the disabled (where you constantly had to fix or adjust things because of the campers’ ability or behavior issues.) I found routine where you couldn’t have a routine.  I must have done something right since I worked there for 4 Summers and was even offered the role of Assistant Camp Director with the possibility of working at the year-round Center if I had come back for a 5th Summer, but I graduated College and went to study in Russia instead. 

Working with the mentally and physically disabled for 4 Summers was the hardest job yet also the most-fun job I ever did. Years later I had to use many of the same skills I learned as a camp counselor outside the camp (both at home and while travelling.) It was a similar situation where I had to find a routine where you couldn’t find a routine.