I spent the last two months living at Kenmont/Kenwood Camp, a sleep-away camp for boys and girls aged 8-15. Camp is a total break from reality. It’s 24 hours of total fun and chaos. From my first day at Kenmont/Kenwood, I fell into a trance. It was a place where girls and guys were separated, for the most part. You see, Kenmont was a camp for boys, while Kenwood was a camp for girls. This meant that the only intermingling was at social events. Otherwise boys were to stay on the boys’ side and girls were to stay on the girls’ side. It was so funny to see how the kids would act like it was a curse to go past your respective side or talk to the opposite gender. Camp was different from the life I was used to living, and I had to spend two months getting used to it.
Since I am a girl, I worked for Kenwood, teaching little girls how to play basketball. Camp was all about having fun with little competition and loads of singing and cheering. I quickly got used to the girls screaming, singing, and chanting at meal times. I also got used to the amount of energy they would always have, even after a full day of activities. In the bunk, there was so much fun, laughter, and games. Camp was a world where girls were taught that they could be themselves because they didn’t have to worry about the male gender watching them. It interested me to see how the girls would act when they were by themselves versus how they would act when boys were around. It was the type of experience that I never got to look at so close up.
Camp is a bubble. For two months, I walked the same paths daily and saw the same people over and over again. Unless we went on a trip, there was no popping that bubble. It was all about spending time with the same people for a long period of time, something I only had to experience at school, and that was only for eight hours a day. At camp, we were living with each other 24/7.
Now, I’m back in Brooklyn, New York, looking at things so differently. I no longer wake up to screaming girls at 7 a.m. I no longer have to worry about putting on tons of bug spray or else risking getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and attacked by gnats. I no longer have to walk up a hill a day expecting the usual ache in my legs. I no longer sit down to eat a meal with my bunk and have them yell at me to “jump shake my booty on my chair.” And most of all, I no longer get annoyed at the fact that there is no cellphone service in the five miles that surround the camp. As amazing as the experience at camp was, I had to step out of the bubble and re-enter the real world where things are just not the same.
