Summer Job (Remix)

This summer, I'm working as a counselor with a leadership camp run by an office I will not name here. The position is "camp counselor," but the class-heavy couple of weeks does not make your typical summer excursion; the role does not match what most people think of when they think "camp counselor." I'm essentially the practical arm of said organization, staying with the kids almost 24/7.

Often this means performing a number of menial tasks that just need to get done; setting up Wi-Fi, making sure the water is stocked, buying shampoo, sometimes helping kids if they're sick or homesick. The issue is this: I answer to the college we're staying at for any mess the kids get in, and I answer to the chaperones for anything that the college screws up (which are many things). My cynical description is that I have all the responsibility and none of the authority. I've described it to a few others (and vehemently to myself, under my breath, with adjectives) as being anywhere on a spectrum from "nuts" to a "nightmare."

The majority of my days are spent moving people to places. I'm in charge of keeping track of the kids in the morning and at night, making sure they are awake and ready to go to breakfast, and getting them on the bus afterwards. In the mornings we go to the Harvard campus to have class. If you ever think to yourself with pride, "yeah, I know stuff," walk through a science building of a prestigious school. Nothing in there makes any sense, and there's an incredible amount of things that don't make any sense. I probably couldn't pass a high school chemistry test at this point, so it's weird that I'm even allowed to be inside a building that has words and phrases like "centrifuge" and "DNA sequencing drop off." For a few days we went to MIT, where the titles made just enough sense to sound even more impressive: "Optimization of Schochastic Strategies for Robot Swarms."

In the afternoon the people moving continues, when I help get them to lunch, bathrooms, the right stores, onto Duck Boats, etc. Imagine herding 32 sheep, who all want to buy something at Starbucks. 

Many problems are no one's fault. In the chain of command, all the people above me are Korean and all the people around and below me are Brazilian, so everyone has their own secret language. I completely understand that it's hard to learn another language-- my French is awful-- so of course I'm not upset at anyone in particular. Everyone's working hard. But not only is it tiring to struggle to be understood, this often causes miscommunication, which is our most rampant problem.

I have to digress here, though. Already I've said "the kids," which is too sweeping a term. That's the issue with talking about a group; the same problem I had when I first went to Africa. It's far too easy to make judgments on a group based on an outspoken minority. In Senegal, one extremely vocal anti-American girl made it look like everyone there hated the US. This assessment might not be completely off-base--no one seemed to care enough to argue with her, after all-- but it was still unfair.

It's a similar situation here; the kids who stand out aren't the one who are respectful and obedient, the ones who are always on time and only have to be told something once-- they were a minority to be sure, but still present. I remember much more clearly the the times when I had to shout to get everyone's attention, when I had to tell the same dude to go to bed three times before he even moved, and when I had to sprint through the halls and unlock doors because people forgot wallets, textbooks, glasses, etc.

Anyway, with one exception, they were all 10-13 years old. And they were all extremely 10-13 years old. It's an age when the consideration lobe is far from developed; very few people at 13 realize that everything they do affects other people. The kids had a propensity for congregating in choke points like stairwells and narrow hallways, and seemed blind to the capacity of trash cans.

Overall, the job is just tough. It's a lot of work. But there are worse jobs. I'd rather work here than at Delta's customer service, for example. And the fact of the matter is: I'm lucky to have a job at all. But man, do I miss three-hour shifts at the coffeehouse.

-Will

"It seems to me I could live my life a lot better than I think I am."