Final Thoughts on Summer Camp

The snacks are back at the old firehouse where I was working this summer. That is to say, the free-lunch program around which our free-rec program was based, is back in business. They temporarily left the scene when the inspectors came around and discovered that they weren't doing things right. The free-lunch coordinators were quick to blame my volunteer Hank for politicking with the inspector, who showed up during our program's portion of the afternoon, and passed our program's snack with flying colors. You see, there are bad feelings between the two agencies. For some stupid reason the two programs were forbidden from working together in the very beginning planning phase of this summer. The director of the free-lunch program --I will safely refer to her as "the wicked witch" from here on out-- refused to incorporate the two separate programs, despite all of our logical arguments imploring her to do so. "My guys will do their own thing. Once they get there, you just sit back and let them operate. We don't want you interfering!" she said, with all the suspense and drama of a CIA agent in a spy-movie thriller. Interfering? How can you interfere with getting children to wash their hands and passing out lunches? Hank's indignance at this meeting was clear, and everyone knew it. So when the wicked witch and her program went down in the dust, wreaking havoc in the wake, she didn't fail to blame Hank for purposefully "tipping" the inspector's nose toward their wrong practices.

As for the secret agents she sent down to the camp, I've never seen a bunch of lazier, more worthless lunch-passer-outers. First of all, one of the most important rules for working with crazy, insane, angry kids is that structure is of the utmost importance. Everything must be structured so that the kids come to expect a routine, and to expect consequences for misbehavior. Instead of a routine, the lunch-passer-outers (ahem, role-models) threw lunches at the kids, and throughout lunch threw unlimited amounts of juice packets to kids on a first-come first-serve basis. Aside from the fact that their casual flippantness was somewhat rude (oh, you're thirsty? Well you'll have to catch it first, twirp!), their approach to the lunches led to mass mayhem that ended with thirty lunch bags and thirty pieces of sandwhiches and thirty plastic wrappers and thirty napkins and thirty drinking straws and thirty spoons and forks and sixty-eight juice packets spread all over the floor, a natural result of a food-fight. Because the two agencies weren't bound to work together, the "lunch people" did not feel that they were obligated to oversee the kids behavior during lunch, nor did they feel responsible for cleaning up the left-overs. After all, they're only the lunch passer-outers.

Only four simple rules guide the free lunch program. First, lunches are only for kids. Well, the first thing Drew would do upon delivering the cooler full of lunches into the kitchen was open the cooler and "test" two or three of the lunches. After determining that they were indeed tasty, Drew would promptly break the second and third rules (kids must eat lunch on premises/don't give more than one lunch to one kid) by giving a kid ten lunches. The kid would then promptly march out to a van full of adults, pass the lunches out to them, and then sometimes even come back for a second round for the ravenous members of the all-you-can-eat buffet, and then the van would drive off and the kid would come in for his own lunch. When little five year olds came in to get their lunch, and there was none left, Drew didn't even look guilty.

The fourth rule is that all the kids must wash their hands before eating. This never happened unless I broke the wicked witch's rules and "interfered."

At our original planning meeting, the witch never informed me that I would actually end up babysitting her agents. When Drew occassionally felt the spark of guilt from not properly performing his job duties, he would cry to me about how bad the kids are, and would even cuss and call them "little fuckers." Oh, how I wanted to slug him! One day he was purposefully thirty minutes late, and when he arrived he asked, "Did the crossing guard lady come yet?" and when I told him that she had come and gone, he said "Good! I hope she and all the rest of the grown-ups who think they can get a free-ride down here came and left! I knew it would work!" This really made me livid, because about 10 kids had come and gone too, plus he is one of those very grown-ups he was talking about. And he would often be late with the lunches because he would stop by his house to pick up his dog, which half of the kids were terrified of. Oh, and then there was the time when we were having a sharing circle and it was his turn and he told them all about how he is in school to be a lawyer and one day they can call him and he'll get them out of jail. Drew is nothing more than a condescending rich white boy.

Of course I confronted Drew several times, but I think my warnings fell on deaf ears. I knew that his actions were jeapordizing the entire lunch program. I confronted him, but what I should have done was grab him by the collar and thrown him up against the door and screamed in his face. Maybe that would have gotten through to him. Sometimes being a nice person just isn't as much of a virtue as I would like to think it is.

But all that was before I learned how to refuse to take no for an anwser. I've been getting a lot of practice at it this summer! If I could go back in time, I would, and I would make Drew listen to me! A few times I tried to demonstrate for him the proper way to pass out lunches by "interfering" and doing it myself, my own way, which worked much better than the chaos that always followed Drew's methods.

So the free-lunch program got the boot from the county because they failed to meet inspection. When they shut down, we kind of fell apart too, because giving lunches to the kids was half of our purpose for being there. How are we going to run a day camp when kids are hungry? And then Hank left for vacation, and we had that fight, and that was the end of the summer. I spent a good three or four days explaining to all the ladies around town what had happened, answering their questions, agreeing that it is a shame that there are no more lunches for the kids, yadda yadda yadda.

Then, as soon as I have explained to the entire city of Archer what has happened, the lunch program mysteriously comes back. And all of about five kids know about it. The rest are not emerging from their cartoon-laden cocoons until school starts again.

Since my car was in the shop today, I walked down to talk to Mike, the volunteer who is doing the program now. Apparently the witch blamed Drew and told him to get the program back or its his job--it's nice to know that she can really be a witch when necessary--and viola!

As for Mike, he's another top-secret agent who falls into rank with all the rest. He's been there for about two weeks now, and now the program says that snack has to be served separately from lunch. This new rule entitles Mike to get paid for picking up lunches at 10:30, driving them to Archer by 11:30, passing them out to five kids from 11:30 to 12:30, driving back to town, doing some miscellaneous task until 2:00, driving out to Archer at 2:30, and passing snack out from 2:30 to 3:00. Ridiculous! Isn't it obvious that the two programs need to work together in order for the other to properly function? Sigh.

Mike is a nice enough guy, and really cute besides. We chatted about his recent trip to Poland, free-offers, and other random things. But really. This guy has a degree in Family and Youth Services and yet he doesn't care about these kids either. The building was covered in trash (proof that the witch's program is incapable of cleaning, since Hank and I made sure to leave that place spotless), and had been vandalized the night before. When the three kids who came for a lunch were trying to flip the half-ton pool table back over, he didn't even worry that they might get hurt, and when they started damaging property, he just put his feet up on the counter and raised his hands behind his head. I questioned him about his attitude, to which he replied, "hey, that's not my job." It made me sick.

Even though it was no longer technically my job, I still had to yell at the kids and make them clean up after themselves. Then I had to leave, because I was really feeling disgusted by the general lack of concern or respect demonstrated by everyone. Blech!