Being at camp is like being in jail sometimes. The food is bad, you wrestle with the other inmates (the kids), and at the end of the day - you feel like you got your ass kicked. Food and candy bars become the currency the way cigarettes do. Counselor NiceBag got each of us a Bar One when she went into town (Bar One is the South African equivalent of a Snickers). I told myself I'd save it for the end of a really bad day, but I already took one bite. Then I told myself I'd ration it for the remainder of the week, but I ended up eating half of it, before forcing myself to stop and put it back under my pillow. But oh that guilty pleasure was so good. I could feel the chocolate coursing through my veins and that warm sweetness filling every corner of my mouth... I had to really brace myself before putting it back, telling myself I'd need it for the remaining days.
The kids were so bad today I was ashamed. I've had to scold them all day, and tonight's evening activity was chaos. They're not getting dessert tomorrow. I had to pull L. aside and tell him, "As long as you're at camp, you have to follow camp rules, which includes doing what the counselors tell you to. If you don't want to follow the camp rules, we can send you home. There's a bus coming tomorrow for all the kids who don't want to stay at camp." Yes, the imaginary bus works wonders on getting kids to behave. I've changed my plan of wanting 16 children of my own. These past 6 days, I got a taste of having 12 children and I'm at my wit's end. I find myself wanting to shake them and asking the unanswerable questionn, "Why are you so bad?" Glasses said it might be homesickness. According to camp philosophy, all this bad behavior is because we're in the "Storming" phase (the phase that comes after "Norming") where the kids begin to test their boundaries. We've had at least 4 fights over the past 2 days. When I wake up in the morning, I drag my feet on the way to the cabin because I can already anticipate the scene that will greet me. Tears and fists.
The most well-adjusted cabin kid is the one who lives with his mother. The next well-adjusted ones are surprisingly the ones from the children's homes. Some of our kids evidently have problems. One of them regularly doesn't eat, or will fail to respond when being spoken to. Another one is bigger than the others and ends up hurting them often when they wrestle. A third one is a complete mystery to me since he rarely smiles, only sometimes participates, but is otherwise well behaved when he's not pounding some kid into the dirt. He helps clean up and such all the time though.
Some of the boys in cabin H have crushes on me, which I suppose is flattering in a 14 year old sort of way. It's been a tough day. Tomorrow I'm teaching Swimming. I get to spend all day sitting in a freezing pool.
