Notes from Camp

Bugs sing outside my window. My roommate, Canadian Tyler, sniffles with a cold and groggily searches for something apparently lost deep within his bags. The first two weeks of our exile in the mountains, minus internet and phone service, have passed by relatively quickly. Along with Cathy and I, the English professors are Emily (Boston), Tyler (Canada) and Ginny (Virginia from Spain). Our coordinator is Maria, a Londoner who was Cathy's roommate in the Golden Days, when we three lived in Spain four years ago. Camp is as expected, negative and positive, plus a little more.

My first two weeks were filled with Spanish kids working out syllable after painstaking syllable of English, speaking to me in broken sentences and adding new phonetic sounds to my native tongue. I smiled through their fruitless attempts at the past simple, late nights in our lab (an actual science laboratory) doing lesson plans, and hostile camp counselors who think that the English Teachers have it too easy. The kids dreaded their English Classes (Student Carmen says: "Can we just skip the rest of the lesson since this is so boring anyway?"). Along with the students, there were days when I as well dreaded the idea of going to class.

But isn't there always a ray of hope? The feverish anticipation with which some of the kids would listen to story time, the days when the adolescents worked together and actually held a conversation in English, the drawing of Spiderman that little, wild-haired Pablo gave to me on the last day of class... Unforgettable moments in a fortnight of many forgettable ones, but ultimately what makes everything worth the effort.