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Letter
From Erin (Camp counselor)
The summer after
my junior year of high school was exhausting, to say the least. I spend eight long weeks as a senior camp
counselor in a day camp and was a co-leader of 15 busy five and six-year-old
children. Seven hours a day, we sang,
played, swam, did art, dance and sports in the hot San Diego sun. The exhaustion was almost too much to take,
but the experience was too rewarding o have passed it all up.
Our
group, the “Sharks,” was a very special group.
We had some very exceptional kids join us that summer who brought so
much more to the group than any of us, counselors or kids, would have ever
imagined. Through a program at the JCC
called “Inclusion,” the Sharks had a number of children with disabilities join
us. Two children with diabetes, a child
with autism and a child with dispraxia were all members of our group.
At
the start of camp, a lot of kids had questions about why this child was
different, or why that child needed extra help sometimes. We all say down in our first week together
and talked about the special needs of some members in the group. With their questions answered, the Sharks
looked at all of their new friends through the same eyes. For these kids, it was nothing they needed
to accept or understand, it was just something that was.
Through
the next eight weeks, I saw something in each child that was amazing. Every child took time out of the day or
their week to spend time with everyone, disabled or not. It proved to me that these kids saw everyone
the same. They didn’t see the
disability or the extra counselor that sometimes needed to help certain kids,
but rather they saw a friend, a playmate, a teammate and a bus buddy on field
trips.
The
parents of our group, who brought their children every morning to camp, had the
same experience. These parents told
stories of their children talking about their new friends and how they were
“different” but not really.” Kids were
going home and talking about other children with disabilities as something
special that they had discovered it. It
gave the parents a sense of gratefulness that their children were learning
acceptance and equality at a young age.
I
can’t explain the feeling of seeing these children act with such compassion and
acceptance. It made me sad, in a way,
that I didn’t see that in everyday life among adults who, above all, should
know better. The things I walked away
with that summer were a new sense of what children can teach adults and how
children can learn at a very young age what the real world is really like. These kids learned that although not
everyone is the same, we don’t have the right to treat them any differently. I think a lot of grownups could have learned
a lot from those kids.
Today,
nearly four years later, I wonder where “my” kids are. I wonder if they have children with
disabilities in their classes or on their teams or in their neighborhood. I can only hope they are teaching that to
other kids as they grow older and can make a difference in the lives of
others. At such a young age, they sure
made a difference in mine.
Kids Included
Together (KIT) is a non-profit organization that helps support youth
service organizations
that make a
commitment to include children with disabilities into their existing
recreational and social programs.
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