Junior Camp #4

This week seems busier than I remember Jr 3 being. It's our first sold-out camp of the summer! It kind of a combination of the first three because we have campers ages 7-12 with a few six-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds too.

The first night went fairly smoothly until around 10 or 10:30 pm when we had the first throw-up of the week. The girl threw up right in the middle of her cabin (yuck!) . We had to evacuate the rest of the campers and the leaders to stay in the retreat centre for the night. One of her leaders took the girl to get cleaned up, and a few other leaders and I cleaned up the spill. The rest of the night was quiet.

The next morning was quiet, I did some laundry and other odd jobs. At around 12:30, a leader brought a boy to me who had been kicked in the head pretty hard during the swim test and had a bad headache. He was Korean and didn't seem to speak great English, but as far as I could tell, the headache was the only problem so I gave him some ibuprofen and sent him on his way. At around 1:00, as he was heading down the steps with a plate of fries in his hands, he threw up too! We cleaned it up as fast as we could and tried to keep other campers from walking through the area. The boy went home until the next day, but now he's back and doing fine.

Most of my time this week had been occupied with a multitude of scraps and minor cuts and homesickness that takes the form of stomach aches. Today I got to go swimming with a few campers. We jumped off the dock and the floating dock, went down the waterslide, and played "What time is it Mr. Shark?" I sat with one of the campers at dinner and showed my table the paper story I know. My brother Jesse also visited today. It was great to see him and go to Tim Hortons and chat with him during my time off.

It's hard to believe the campers are already going home tomorrow! It doesn't feel like Thursday yet because this camp started a day late due to the long weekend. However, some of the younger campers are definitely running out of steam, needing extra naps or early bedtimes or just being generally difficult to handle.

This weekend is a staff weekend so I won't be home, but hopefully it will be a good time of resting and reconnecting with the other Sr. staff. You might be surprised how little time we get to talk to each other during the week. I hope your weekend is relaxing too!

~Quark