Showing Off!

Because I love reality TV and all of our challenges are based on challenges I've seen on TV, we've been videotaping each challenge and making short youtube videos to show what we are doing. I have been emailing them to the camper parents, but also to a long list of my family and friends.

This morning, I got this email from a camp director friend of mine-

I’ve been showing my camp director the videos of your challenges this week. I really want him to see a well-run camp. I’m not sure if this is going to work out, but I was thinking of coming up either tonight or tomorrow morning just to see your last day of challenges. Would that be a total invasion of your camp?

Like me (and my other director friend from earlier this week), B was a YMCA Day Camp director who just took over a resident camp that has been mismanaged and was in poor shape. We had dinner a few times before camp and I gave her some of my programming and training pieces. She is experiencing several of the same challenges I went through but is hopeful about the potential of her camp.

I was thrilled to get her email- I'm not sure there is a greater compliment possible than her comments. I wrote back right away and said yes and then showed her email to A, m and K because I was so proud to have gotten it.

It feels like yesterday that I was new to this camp, pulling my hair out every other day at something else going wrong. Six years later, there are still challenges (there always will be), but so much has changed. The progress that I've made as a director and that camp has made is indescribable. There are few people who can possibly understand how drastically improved this camp is.

'B' is where I was 6 years ago and literally every story she tells, I can relate to 100%. It is such a weird feeling to be able to talk to her and feel like I am watching myself from the past. I am so excited for her because she is going to do such great things for her camp and hopefully, a few years from now, someone emails her to compliment her "well run camp."

She and her program director came to camp this evening and watched the challenge (this as the make up from yesterday's debacle). We set up a scene (it was a kayak with about 15 other items strategically on and around it). Campers had to look at the scene and then run back to their team and send them out to find those items around camp and then recreate the scene. We were sticklers for detail and it was a very fun and exciting challenge.

It was fun to watch them watch the challenge. I felt proud that they were impressed. Afterwards, we toured camp and once again, I felt so complimented as they asked to take photos of some of the areas of camp that they thought were cool or ideas they wanted to use for their camp. It feels like yesterday that I looked around at a dirty, disorganized camp and felt frustration, shame, and hopelessness at my pathetic little camp. To be able to walk around and "show off" my beautiful, organized camp felt good.

I listened to them talk about their camp and I just wanted to repeat, over and over and over, "yep! me too! it was like that here! YES! amen! I totally understand!!" I tried to hold back but it was amazing to be able to so strongly relate to someone else's experience.

For the second time this week, I was reminded, in a very powerful way, of how far we've come and what a wonderful camp this is. We can't give up on it.