mikao's world

the summer job series, part 2

Summer of 1999 I got a job working at Kippewa for Girls, a private girls camp located near Monmouth, Maine. I had never worked in the states before, so this was a pretty exciting experience for me at the time.

I took the bus to Maine, with another girl I met in Calgary (we had been given the names and contact information of all the staff previous to arriving at camp so we could make travel arrangements). Altogether, my trip lasted 101 hours... which I would not recommend any sane person do! I did have the wonderful experience of seeing Alberta, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine (and maybe a few other states, I've forgotten now) first hand... but it was a very long and tiring five days of travel. In Chicago my aunt met us at the bus depot, and during our five hour layover she took us home, let us shower, and fed us some delicious salmon burgers that I still remember today. I didn't know the girl that I travelled with previously, but we actually ended up spending the first month counselling together in cabin as well so that was nice. She was into Wicca, so that was interesting to learn about. She was a city girl though, so travelling through Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston's bus depots was not the hair-raising experience to her that it was to me.

There were 140 campers and 70 staff, with 35 staff from Canada, 9 from the USA, and the rest were all from overseas. If you know anything about New England childrens' camps, then you'll know there are literally hundreds of them, with a large majority of them recruiting cheap staff from overseas. It was neat to get to know people from all over the world, and for awhile, I did keep in touch with some of them. But I didn't really form any lasting friendships.

The camp offered it's campers all sorts of arts and crafts, horseback riding, tennis, water skiing, boating, sailing, canoeing, sports, drama, etc. etc. The campers were all very affluent and paid a bundle to be there! Some of the campers were of course snobby like you'd expect them to be, but some were lovely children, and some were very needy children. I remember finding out one of the campers I taught for a couple of weeks lived in a wing of her house with her nanny and only saw her parents usually on holidays.

My job turned out to be a cabin counsellor and arts and crafts instructor. Along with two other counsellors, I co-counselled in a cabin called Fox Haven, with eight campers. Campers were there for a month or two months straight, I had two different groups of four-week campers.

Every week I got to teach different arts and crafts, but usually I taught sewing and painting, and depending on the weekn, sometimes I also taught stained glass, beadwork, jewellry making, leatherwork, ceramics, pottery-making, and various paper and kids' crafts. Arts and crafts counsellors got to use pretty much whatever they wanted for crafts supplies, so I did a few paintings that summer that I still love, and also got to explore the medium of stained glass.

The campers at this camp were primarily Jewish, but not religious Jewish... so that was an interesting experience. Some of my cabin campers were very curious about the Bible and Christianity, so that was neat. Sometimes, I still get an email from a couple of them every once in awhile.

The camp grounds were beautiful, on a big lake, with 20 something cabins, all different. I had hoped to be in one with a porch or fireplace, but instead I ended up with one of the larger cabins with no porch or fireplace, but that turned out to be okay. All of the cabins had their own bathrooms which was nice... a luxury I recommend all camps invest in! ;)

We all had one day a week off, mine was Sundays. I didn't really know any of the other counsellors with Sundays off, except for one, and she left after a couple of weeks. While it was custom to rent or borrow a car for your day off and go to Freeport to go shopping, I usually ended up spending a solitary day off exploring the local Maine countryside by bicycle. I had a lot of fun visiting little antique shops and taking photos of the architechture and nature around the area. There was a lovely little cemetery just down the road from the camp that I liked to explore... there were a lot of neat gravestones, very different from any I had ever seen before, all with interesting sayings on them.

This I took at the shore of the lake at the camp.


I got to see the Atlantic Ocean twice that summer, and the first time was also exactly four years from the date that I saw the Pacific Ocean, so I thought that was kind of neat.

This picture is from one of our day trips to the ocean. I love this photo.

The way home I travelled myself, except for the first leg of the trip from Augusta, Maine, to New York City, which I went with a Polish girl. Once we arrived in New York, we found out that the bus I was to take didn't really exist... but that is another story that thankfully I'm still alive to tell.

What did I learn that summer? Well, it was my first summer away from home, and I was very far from home, the farthest I had ever been. I think I learned more independence, and that friendship is a very valuable thing. I also learned some of the value of prayer, the value of a living faith, and the value of reliance on God to get you through what you never imagined you would experience.