EDITORIAL: Our summer counselors (07/20/03)

EDITORIAL

Our summer counselors

Summer for our children means so many wonderful things. It means finding a pool to swim in all day or a field to play on until the sun sets. It means ice cream trucks and sleeping in.

When he spoke about summer, writer Henry James said it well: "Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon ... the two most beautiful words in the English language."

Summer is also a time when parents throughout North America send their kids to all sorts of camps - scouting, dancing, soccer, even fencing camps. You name the event, activity or sport and there's probably a summer camp for it.

For the Ukrainian diaspora in North America the choices seem endless. There are bandura camps, dance workshops and cultural tours that travel through Ukraine, not to mention the large number of camps offered by the Ukrainian American Youth Association (SUM) and Plast Ukrainian Scouting Organization. There's even a camp named after a famous line of dogs at the Ukrainian National Association's Soyuzivka resort - Chemney Camp.

And let's face it, some of our strongest childhood memories are from summer camps. It's where we learned independence, responsibility and leadership. It's where many of us, with our parents nowhere in sight, learned to work through our fears and problems.

It is important to note, however, that our summer camps, and the experiences that come with them, would not happen without the help of a very important group of people. No, dear readers, we're not talking about the parents, although we do recognize what it means to be a mother or father. We mean to thank and recognize our summer camp counselors.

We put our children in their hands, not for several hours a day, but often for 24 hours a day and several weeks at a time. We trust them with what's most precious and irreplaceable. We not only task them with watching over our children at all hours of the day and night but we ask them to teach, to be sympathetic yet stern, decisive yet willing to listen, to enjoy themselves while carrying out their responsibilities, and we ask them to do all of this for next to nothing. In some cases our counselors actually pay to work at a summer camp.

A discussion about our camp counselors came up recently at our editorial offices in Parsippany, N.J., while we were talking about Plast's Vovcha Tropa campground in East Chatham, N.Y., which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and will commemorate that milestone during a weekend of celebrations on July 18-20. The discussion led us to think about all of the counselors we have encountered through the years in all of the various camps throughout North America and how much they have done.

It seems that so many of us have in our minds a counselor whom, to this day, we can remember fondly or that we look up to. Perhaps it was the counselor who told us stories at night to send us off to sleep, who befriended us - someone we looked up to with awe, hoping one day to be just like him or her. Or maybe we remember the counselor who, after a remarkably long rainstorm, lent us something dry to wear. Or, perhaps, we remember the counselor who simply stood by us when everything felt so alien and unfamiliar. They made missing home more bearable.

So, if you're planning to visit a camp this summer, for whatever reason, don't not forget the counselors - many of whom are young and could be laying around a pool or the beach or earning a significantly larger amount of money via a professional internship. These counselors have instead decided to enhance our children's lives and to be a part of the history of a place like the SUM "oselia" in Ellenville, N.Y., or Plast's Vovcha Tropa. Why not take some time to thank them for the valuable work they do and the care they show our children?

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