chickens

This story ends with chickens, but it doesn't start there. As some of you may or may not know, one of the activities at Adventure Camp is called Early Settlers, and kids get to make candles, cook over a fire, make wooden spoon dolls and other fun things that pioneers may have done in the olden days. The Early Settlers activity has a coop of chickens for the kids to feed and collect the eggs and see what taking care of animals was like in the olden days. Almost no one at camp actually likes the chickens, and there is definitely no one at camp who likes the chickens as much as I do. I could easily sit outside their coop for an hour just hanging out and intermittently throwing food in for them to nom on and gathering the eggs.

In my role as Assistant Program Director, I don't get to spend too much time one on one with campers, which is definitely a big transition from my days as a chalet leader where I was always one on one with the kids. The other day, there was a camper in the nurses station and not too many staff around, so I was responded saying that I was free to walk her back to her chalet. I turns out that she was having a bit of a meltdown in the nurses station and was refusing to lay down, sit, go back to the chalet, really to do anything but stand in the corner. I exercised all my good leader skills and tried to distract her with various talking subjects or options of what we could do other than stand in the corner, but she wasn't having any of it. So, I called in one of her section heads thinking that I must have forgotten something or that she just didn't want to talk with me, but he had pretty much verbatim the same conversation with her and she was still refusing to do anything.

Then I decided to go for random. "You know what my favorite part of camp is? It's the chickens. Did you know we have chickens?" I could tell that she wasn't ready to move yet, but that I had piqued her interest. I talked about how you can feed them and collect the eggs and I just let the option of walking to visit the chickens sit in the air. Eventually, she decided that she wanted to walk with me up to see the chickens, so we went and had a lovely visit with the chickens eating out of our hand.

"Can we come back tomorrow, Rogue?"
"As long as it's alright with your leader."

So, we went back the next day. We collected the eggs and gave each one a name. We let the chickens pinch our palms as they ate and ate like they'd never been fed before. We have plans to go back tomorrow.

The best part of this story is not the victory that it was to get her out of the nurses station (though I was pretty proud of myself for that) but that a camper knows my name. She calls and waves to me every time she sees me. And I got to share one of my favorite things about camp with a little friend.