Just a little bit of a rant because I believe the people on here would appreciate this story. I am 17, got my first job at a summer camp when I was 16. I was staff at a sleep away camp where the staff sleeps there too. I had to be up and in uniform at 7, most nights I didn’t go to bed until 11 because of “helping out”. I had an hour break in the middle of the day, but most of the time my bosses found busy work for us to do during that time. I worked six days a week. I got paid 1,500. For nine weeks. I’ll repeat that: I worked six days a week, 7 to 11 most nights, for nine weeks. That’s literally under two dollars an hour. And this was justified by the fact that they paid for housing and food. My housing was not a room, not in a house. Im not exaggerating when I say the “cabin” we lived in was a giant plywood box with holes for windows on a concrete slab. And the food? I’d never been overweight in my life until I worked there. I have to be a vegetarian, I literally cannot digest meat. But the food they served was so piss poor and devoid of any real nutrition that I gained twenty pounds even without eating meat. Soon as I left and went back to cooking my own food, lost the weight in a month. And the kicker was that I couldn’t just not eat the food there. Mealtimes were mandatory, and no outside food allowed. And I had no way of cooking or storing my own food.
I felt like I was losing my mind the entire time. Everyone else seemed to be fine. Mind you, nearly everyone else there is my age or a little older. So that could be the innocence of the naïve. I kept the happy face on most of the time, despite my center being drastically understaffed. There was a time where I, a 16 year old, was in charge of sixty children. Sixty. Outside, by myself. Trying to run a class, a class that most kids are expected to pass. So as expected, my mental health degraded rapidly.
There are other miscellaneous atrocities that certainly deserve to be talked about, but they are too specific, and for a reason that feels like borderline Stockholm syndrome.
I want to go back next summer.
Me and my coworkers were all the closest friends. How could we not be? We are together, lived together, worked together. And the motto of the camp was do it for the kids. There was this overall attitude that we were doing gods work. Shaping childhoods. I miss it, I miss the kids, I miss my friends. I miss all the staff campfires and swim breaks and nights out. I miss the pride I had in working there.
I’m ending this here and going to bed. I’ll answer any responses in the morning.