Camp To Belong is a special summer camp designed to bring together siblings who are in the foster care system and have been separated from each other. Many of the sibling groups at Camp To Belong rarely see each other, and even the ones who do see each other do so only under supervised visitation situations. Camp To Belong is a place where they get to live, eat, play and even sleep together, for one week, while participating in traditional camp activities as well as therapeutic activities. I have volunteered as a counselor there for several summers. The following is a journal I kept, depicting everyday life at Camp To Belong.

Day One: Every time I’m getting ready to go to CTB, I start getting all nervous… but once I get here, everything feels so familiar, its like I never left!

I got a ride from the airport with the teenaged Wigwam staff members. (Camp Wigwam is a boys’ camp that lets us utilize their property and their staff for one week each summer.) After dinner, we made “I am” posters to hang up around the lodge. When the kids come, they will make “I am” posters of their own.

I am very tired from my trip here, and training starts tomorrow, so I’m going to stop writing and get to sleep!

Day Two: 6:15 am. I’m just waking up! It is freezing cold! I didn’t take a shower because I would have had to get up at 5:45. Maybe tomorrow. Today we have a smudging ceremony before breakfast. We do this every year on the first day of training, to start the week out on a positive note and to get our minds and spirits in the right place!

11:30 am. We’ve been doing team building this morning… the usual goofy “getting to know you” exercise, and also some things meant to be metaphors for what life will be like at camp. One of the exercises was to write about a fear we have about camp, and then put it in a bag. We all randomly picked papers out of the bag to read aloud and talk about. Some people put silly things like, “Farting in front of the group,” but mostly everyone has some sort of fear about not being able to do the right thing for the kids.

We also learned that the kids might act in negative ways, but not to take it personally, because they are dealing with a lot in their lives.

4:30 pm. We had a few hours of training (boring stuff like rules and routines that I already remember from last summer) and then… hurray… we got to go for a swim! The water felt so good after sitting in the hot lodge for the meeting. I washed up with the floating bottle of peppermint soap. That might be the best bath I get all week!

During swimming, some of us were talking about kids from the camp’s previous summers. Like the Lawrence kids, who talked like truck drivers, got into fist fights with each other, and won everyone’s hearts; And Andrew and Billy, two little boys who used to literally swing from the rafters in their cabin during quiet time. It is always the “hard” kids who you end up missing the most! None of the kids we were talking about are coming back this year. Kids in foster care move on quickly. I wonder what new kids will steal my heart?

10:00 pm. Tonight was an awesome night. We did a team building exercise that was like a scavenger hunt. My team lost, but we had a lot of fun in the process! Part of the reason we lost was because some of the clues were messed up. But we all shared the prize anyway, so it didn’t matter!

After that, we had a campfire, and roasted marshmallows and sang songs and looked at the stars.