Back from camp

A blog post by Adam. We've been away from the blog because we've been away from everything...from our phones, from television, from the Internet, from daily salads, from contact with family and friends. For fifteen days we were away...at summer camp.

Campamento Esperanza y Alegría (http://camphopeandjoy.wordpress.com/), or Camp Hope and Joy, is a summer camp for kids with HIV sponsored by the clinic where I'm volunteering. In its ninth year, the camp hosts 80 kids over a two week period, with younger kids coming the first week, and adolescents arriving the second week.  Melissa and I were among ten international camp counselors, which included five Peace Corps Volunteers, and five additional Americans. The rest of the staff were Dominican.

The camp was like the major leagues of Dominican culture. In other words it was like the DR on steroids. The joy. The dancing. The singing. The starchy carbohydrates. The power and water outages. The yelling. All of it was bigger, more colorful, and a whole lot louder.

The bus ride from La Romana set the stage for fifteen days of souped-up Dominican life. The music blared full blast while one person played the drum, and another played a güira (a metal Dominican percussion instrument). Everyone spilled out into the aisle and the dance fest commenced. It was, well, like nothing I had ever experienced.

By the time the campers arrived after three days of preparations we were starting to get our Dominican  groove on.  The kids, however, really pushed us over the edge. Their enthusiastic energy coupled with their incredible dance moves took the camp to a whole new level. They were so much fun and they were so exhausting. 

Still, what stuck me most was how loving they were to each other and to the counselors, regardless of how well we understood them. There were a few campers with disabilities...deafness, developmental delays, and physical disabilities. And rather than facing ridicule and abuse, the typically developing campers treated them with respect and love, particularly when they performed in the talent show - the loudest cheers were always for the kids with disabilities. It was a wonderful display of the very loving Dominican culture.

Nevertheless, as each week of camp came to a close, the underbelly of Dominican life emerged, just as much on steroids as the rest of camp. This was the harsh reality facing so many of the campers back at home. Many had lost one or both parents to HIV. One evening a camper asked which counselors would return, knowing that many us would not be back next year. Sadly, for some, camp's ever changing counselors mirrored the lack of consistent adults they experience in their lives outside camp. For others, returning home meant limited access to food - one camper told me he often didn't take his morning HIV medications because he did not have the breakfast that was supposed to accompany the pills.

It was a bittersweet ending to what had been a great week for the campers. Tears filled the eyes of the younger campers as their bus pulled away from camp. And in their own way, the older campers seemed sad that the camp had passed by so quickly. For me, it been had a great learning experience and yet another reminder of the tremendous joy and sadness that seem to be so ever present in the DR.