Summertime

At last.

School for me actually ended a week ago.  Graduation was the Friday of Memorial Day weekend.  The party was had.  The mosquitos ate me alive.  I drank and ate and generally had a blast being with adults.

But then came the greatest week of my summer...that isn't really summer.  Camp.  It's got a longer name, but in the interests of my semi-anonymity, I'll just call it Camp.

It really is a proper noun.

Or an imperative.

A moral imperative that is.

You see, every year, the students at our high school run a four day day camp for rising 3rd and 4th graders from a school in southwest Birmingham.  These kids are from families that are, by and large, working poor.  They can't afford a camp opportunity.  With the help of their principal, 20 or so honor roll students come to our school for fun.  We make new friends.  We hug and cry when the week is gone.

Pretty much, my friends, it's camp.  Except that our students LITERALLY run it.  There are four adults involved in the planning - liaising with the school, coordinating permissions, calling off-site vendors to see if they're involved again this year.  A paid staff of four to six high school kids plan it.  Schedule it.  Solve the problems as they crop up.  Keep the ADHD kid out of the dining hall without shoes...you get it.

And the rest of the counselors?  They volunteer.  They apply.  They are selected.  And then, they work their butts off playing with kids whose home lives are foreign to our children of comfort, if not privilege.  They sweat, get jumped on, play kickball, and ride the school bus to and from Birmingham proper.  It's ALABAMA my friends.  It's nasty hot.  And these 20 or so kids do it for no pay, getting up every morning on their first week of summer vacation, to be back at their school at 8:30 am to play with a bunch of sweaty pseudo-tough babies from Birmingham.

This year, C, in her first camp, was in tears when she read the campers' inscriptions on their memory books: "Culver Creek (an alias)  is the best place in the world, and no one wants to leave." You get the idea.

H, also in her first camp, saw me on the last day and said "You were right.  I'm exhausted.  It's amazing.  I'll be back."

And then, there was the Director of Admission, who came down the morning of the last day and said..."I got emails on this camper.  I've been spoken to by two of your counselors, one paid staffer, and three adults...where is he, and how do we get him back on campus next year...and the year after."  When this little boy left, he left with admissions materials slipped into his bag, a brief explanation of what a scholarship was, and promises to about five of us that "I won't let you down."

How far we have come, in this town that was once known as Bombingham.  How far we still have to go, when urban blight runs rampant at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement.

I did a Flat Stanley project for a friend's son today.  I took the Demie Diva down to Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and Kelly Ingram Park.  I explained to my almost kindergartener that not very long ago, there were mean guys who didn't want her to be friends with J.  because his skin was brown.  The park we were in wasn't a playing park.  It was a praying park;  men like Dr. King and Rev. Shuttlesworth said "no" and at the church that's kitty corner, Mr. McNair's little girl and three others died because mean guys bombed it.

My child processed this as best she could.

To her, it boiled down simply to this..."The King was a nice man.  He wanted the mean guys to quit being mean.  And now he's DAID" (best redneck accent on the last please) 


The Civil Rights Movement according to my almost kindergartener.

Mean people suck.  Nice people don't.