Baggsy123

Probably learning that one of my campers was being taken care of by his grandfather his whole life because one night the parents asked him to babysit, they both left the house and never came back.

Hmm, probably the biggest problem we had to solve was to find the best way for them to navigate the terrain of camp and canoe trips as each person had a different answer, going up a big set of stairs was often a problem we faced.

Some we could carry them up, some had to find another way round, and we had to describe the staircase in good detail for any blind campers that wanted to navigate without assistance.

I only flew back home yesterday so super jet lagged actually thanks for asking, how are you?

Thanks I hope you did too!

Surprisingly we didn't need to do a lot of adaptation, we learnt that early on. For example we played a big game of baseball with a group of able bodied kids against campers in wheelchairs, and we didn't have to change any rules, as long as they have control in at least one arm to swing a bat and catch, all we needed to do was push them. It was the same for most other things like tennis, basketball, hockey... Pretty much anything other than swimming or activities with lots of rough terrain required minimum adaptation.

We had one week where we rented sports wheelchairs and "sledge" hockey equipment (sledge hockey is way more fun than normal hockey).

I was always planning on working at a summer camp, it was always something I wanted to do.

I applied to a program that matches you with camps that it thinks you are suited for depending on personality, experience ect. Camp awakening was the first camp to contact me, at first I was super scared of the idea of working with disabilities as that was way out of my comfort zone at the time, but I decided to take a gamble and it paid off.