Patience. If you think you have it or you are looking to find more, work with people with special needs. I'm serious. After my last year in NCCC, I felt that I had lost quite a bit of patience, humility, and compassion, things I felt I had gained quite a bit of during my first year. One of the reasons I wanted to come back and work at a camp for people with special needs is to find some of those things within myself again, to regain what I felt I had lost. While it is one of the hardest jobs, I'll probably ever have, I think it is probably one of the most rewarding. Right now, I feel like I'm still hung up on the differences from the camp I worked at last summer when I should be focusing on the task at hand and helping campers to have the best week that they possibly can. While there are definite pluses and minuses to both places, I can't help but be more appreciative of Camp K, the people there (both campers and staff), and the things they taught me both about others and about myself.
There are always times when I feel that the end goal to a job like this isn't worth it. Those times usually come at a point of complete exhaustion around 2am when you have to spend the night in the campers' cabin for overnight duty. I'm not going to pretend I even remotely like cabin duty. Here, there are scheduled wake up times every three hours in addition to the other things that might come up. But after taking a nap the next day and gaining some clarity, I realize what a humbling experience it is to have someone else's safety, well being, and even bathroom habits be your life's purpose for 9 hours when most other people are sleeping. I make no promises that I won't think "If I quit tomorrow, I'll never have to do this ever again" during my next cabin duty, but I will try and maintain some perspective.
Thinking back on my campers last summer, I didn't have any huge behavioral challenges. Most of the tasks that proved daunting at first were personal care tasks, which now I feel like don't really phase me at all. Last week, I had a pretty good group, but there was one camper in particular who challenged me like I have never been challenged before. This is someone who, at times, just shut down and couldn't express how she was feeling if she was upset or frustrated. So she would lash out, hurting herself or whoever happened to be close by. That was a pretty challenging day for me, so I can imagine it was also pretty challenging for her, not being able to let me know what she needed and how I could help.
This camp also doesn't have a no cell phone rule like Camp K, which I find to be a bit strange since service here is very limited anyway. It's interesting to see that even at a place where we are supposed to be out and enjoying nature, people (campers and staff alike) are still glued to their cell phones. I wonder how things will change for people with special needs when, as technology advances, we as human beings become increasingly closed off from each other. Many of the campers exhibit what is called "attention seeking behaviors", which could be biting themselves, interrupting conversations, hitting, etc. in order to gain attention from their family or care takers, even if it is negative attention. Some of these behaviors are pretty alarming for a camp counselor who has only known them a few days. I wonder when and if this attention seeking will evolve along with the technology as it becomes harder and harder to get that face to face contact they so crave. These people with special needs who are craving this attention could actually teach all of us a thing or two about the value of positive human human contact-that it is still necessary even at a basic human level.
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