Ladies and gentlemen, it is good to see you. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was going to make it back here.
See, I have a problem. You may even say it’s a family problem. If I’m part of an organization putting on a big event and I’m given the opportunity to volunteer to help organize it, I will. I have too many years of seeing my mother volunteer to work on festivals, charity balls, fairs, and the like. Too many formative moments of my life were spent folding programs and developing spreadsheets with my brothers. I’m stuck.
So when City Year called for volunteers to help lead Camps, of course I volunteered. Camps, despite the name, is actually a singular camp that takes place during the Seattle Public Schools spring break. It’s four days of activities, crafts, and skits cumulating in a carnival on the fifth and final day. The camp itself is extremely inexpensive (only $5) and primarily serves students who would otherwise be left home alone all week while their parents worked. Run entirely by City Year corps members and our staff, saying that the 200 student camp is a headache would be putting it mildly.
My job really kicked into gear about two weeks before the camp itself, finalizing the schedule for the campers. It doesn’t sound all that tough, until you realize that those 200 students are split up into 20 teams, each team of which rotates through a series of 6 activities a day in different classrooms. At any given time there are 20 different activities being run, each of which needs its own space, teacher, instructions and supplies. Making sure that each activity had everything it needed and was scheduled properly for smooth and easy rotation? That fell to me.
So I abandoned my site and my team and basically lived in the office. But I’ve done this before. I’m used to the ever-changing cycle of problems and schedule revisions, the realization that every time something gets fixed two other things will spring up needing to get done, the feeling that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. But I had help this time, and I luckily wasn’t in charge of the entire shebang (that fell to my boss, Janay, and the Camps Director, Tom). So I went with the flow.
What I wasn’t used to was the sheer amount of stamina needed to put on a five day event. I’ve helped with one or two day events, but a five day one? This was organizing on a level I hadn’t even considered before. Luckily I had a boss who made sure that I went home; that I ate and breathed.
You might not consider that last injunction completely necessary, given mankind’s addiction to oxygen. But on that first day? When no one knew the layout of the school or understood the schedule and staff were giving conflicting directions to the corps and the heavens decided to open up and wreck havoc on the world and everyone was looking for direction and the instructions for activities were confusing and a huge presentation needed to be set up in the gym and students were constantly arriving for registration?
Yeah. I needed a reminder to breathe.
But after that first day things evened out. I found time to actually see the projects and meet the kids who were attending. It was still hectic, after all an event is nothing more than a series of fires that need to be put out, but it was manageable.
Still, despite the fun I watched the kids having, despite the awesome skits, despite the time spent playing basketball and hanging out with corps members I rarely see, one of the best parts of the entire thing was the relief I felt at the end. That moment where I took a deep breath and found myself finally able to relax.