Day in the LIFE

what a day in the life a mike looks like... Well... It is hard to describe of
course...

My job consists of being a counselor, nurse, teacher, parent, coach, pastor,
friend, leader, and motivational speaker to a group of 10 boys 24
hours a day 5 days a week with a couple of other adults. We do
everything together and do it all in the woods. We live out in the
open air all year round and learn many things about life and how to
live with many other people, and how to solve our problems. We build
our tent / cabins in the woods ourselves, go on trips and many other
things.

My day usually starts around 5:30am with hitting the snooze button on
my battery powered alarm clock because we don't have electricity in
our campsite. Then around 6am I get out of bed and since it is winter
I go make a fire to warm up to and so the boys can have a place to get
warm when they get up. After making my bed and cleaning my tent, I
talk with my teammate and then wake the boys up at around 6:30am.
Which then means that I help them make their beds and start the never
being alone for the rest of the day.

By 7am The boys have made their beds, cleaned their tents, and we have
gone over all of our individual goals as a group. The boys all have
goals for things they want to and really need to be working on, from
talking out their frustrations to not arguing. So many problems and so
much time. Because by 7:30am the boys have cleaned our entire campsite
which included sweeping out tents, racking trails, cleaning lanterns,
setting up a campfire for the night... It is pretty sweet that we all
learn how to keep out rooms and our home clean even when we live in
the woods.

8am we are eating in our dining hall, with the other groups, food that
our wonderful cooks that we call moms have made for us. Unless it is
Wednesday or Thursday when we cook our own meals in our campsites over
the fire. Can you imagine 12 of us boys around one table trying to
have one guy talking at a time?... sometimes I can't imagine it
either. But it is what we try to do. After the meal we share with the
other groups what we did last night and what we will be doing in the
morning. We also sing lots of crazy songs and sometimes play games or
talk about different things.

9am or 9:30 we either sweep the dining hall out or take out the trash
and then head to the bathroom and then brush our teeth. Then we do
what our group has planned for the morning. This could be building a
tent like I will be doing tomorrow, playing games, carving crafts,
doing academics, canoeing, fishing, planning for trips, packing for
trips, go for a ramble hike... So many things that the boys get to
plan the week before for what we want to do and what we need to do...

that will take us till about 11:30am Because at that time we need to be heading back to the
Chuckwagon for lunch or starting to make lunch ourselves. Making meals
is a lot of fun at camp; the boys and us Chiefs decide what meals we
want and we make a menu for it, including what ingredients we will
need and how much it will cost. They can spend $2 per person per meal.
So lots of math and budgeting skills learned here and we cant for get
the cooking skills we all learn. Yesterday I got to spend some time
over the fire with a couple of my guys making bullseye eggs and
sausage pattie sandwiches. It was amazing if I do say so myself :)
When the meal is about ready at campsite or the chuckwagon we send a
couple of guys to set our table proper etiquette style. And then we
head on in when someone creatively calls us in with a short skit.

You might have noticed I referred to us staff as "chiefs" and that is
because when we work at camp we all get a new first name. And that is
Chief. You might be able to think of it like the changing of names in
the Bible: Abram to Abraham, Simon to Peter, Saul to Paul, little
piece of no good garbage to Child of God :) So we are always referred
to by campers and and staff as Chief or more precisely for me Chief
Mike.

So after another great meal with our boys talking about their favorite
superhero, or what trip we want to take and what we are going to need,
or some other story telling time about the man that cut trees into
shapes of turtles and spirals then we have a couple of guys clean the
table off and we do more singing and telling the other groups what we
have accomplished and what we will accomplish in the afternoon. If it
is Wednesday of Thursday and we are at our campsite we will have some
people doing the dishes while the rest of us are usually doing some
paperwork / academics. They have to write plans for what we will be
doing the following week, and articles on things they are
experiencing. Writing really helps the learning sink in as I know for
myself also. It also helps them learn how to write and spell and to
express their thoughts. So during this time I am usually checking the
guys work. I need to check for sppelling and an grammar mistake that
they might had. Give them suggestions and all that fun stuff that
isn't always fun.

So after the dishes are clean we take more bathroom breaks and brush
our teeth to prepare us for a SIESTA from 1:30pm to 2:30pm! This is a
great way to spend an hour. The rest of the world sees the importance
in siestas and so do we. This time for me is usually spend doing some
paperwork of how the boys are doing, reading, napping, working out,
preparing for the rest of the day, and/or like yesterday sitting with
a boy who had an attitude problem and wanted to be stubborn.

Then after Siesta we get the guys up and continue with our afternoon
plan which could be chopping wood, fixing up campsite, looking up maps
of places we want to canoe, planning a skit to share with camp,
designing a tent we want build, cutting down trees to build a tent,
hiking with our sandbag filled packs to explore our 900 acres of camp,
or swimming in our pond and jumping off the high dock. We are getting
so close to being able to do this!

When 4:30pm comes around we need to be getting close to our shower
house so that we can shower and clean our shower house after we make a
mess of it. We should be done with that by 5pm so we can make it to
table set at 5:15pm and be eating again the most amazing food at
5:30pm. We do the normal eating fun and sing and share with the rest
of camp what we are up to. This leads us into about an hour and a half
to take bathroom breaks, brush and do a settled plan for the evening.
These plans are usually personal academics, crafts, or settled group
games like homemade bounderbash. We then wrap up the fun by finishing
the day off with Pow-Wow a little after 8pm.

Pow-Wow is like sitting around the living room, or in our case a fire,
and talking about the day. We try to talk about the good things of the
day, what we learned, where we grew, what we liked. Even if it was a
really hard day and didn't seem like we were very successful we can
still learn from it and look for some positives. We even referred to
it last night as the sports center highlights of the day; there is so
much that happens all day long and we can't see it all but we can try
to recap the best parts of the day and feel good when we go to bed.
At pow-wow we will also read the plan that one of the boys wrote about
what we will be doing the next day, pray, and How out the day! Putting
the boys to bed and hugging them between 8:30 and 9pm on a good night.

"How out the day" is a term you might not understand. We at camp like
to "How" when we do something good, or welcome someone, or
congratulate someone, or honor someone; which is this loud cheer
"1-2-3 How How How." It is putting our mark of approval on something.
We also do a lot of evaluating throughout the day. Before every
activity including riding in a van and eating a meal or taking a
shower, we get a plan of what we expect from each other as a group and
maybe how fast we plan on doing it. This gives us something to measure
ourselves to and challenge ourselves and something we put our word on
that we will be successful in. So after we follow with our plan we
evaluate how we did as a group.

After the boys are in bed, we as Chiefs get a few things ready for the
next day and do some fun paperwork and maybe do some reading
ourselves, writing, working out, and/or talking like the great friends
we have become. These friendships are so important to our health. Just
like if there is problems with a married couple it can tear apart the
family. In the same way if the chiefs are loving and supporting each
other it can make for a loving a supporting group.

There is so much more I am sure that we do and that doesn't make much
sense in writing. It took me 3 or 4 days of visiting camp to really
start to understand that this place was something that I could do and
wanted to do. And now a year and a half later I am still learning what
camp is all about. Any Questions? :)