EXPLORE!
PROGRAMS
Resident Camps
Respite
Team Quest
FACILITIES
Camp Friendship
Eden Wood Center
EMPLOYMENT
Join Us
LEND A HAND
Giving to Friendship
Volunteers
ALUMNI
Staff Alumni Site
CONTACT
Contact Information
Email
Chance of a Lifetime.
Staff Alum Melissa Craig, a counselor at Camp Friendship during the summers of 2002 and 2003, submitted this story via the Friendship Ventures staff webpage, Venturing On. She was inspired to write after reading about the all-staff reunion June 25. Read below for reunion details.
When I started college in 1999, I wanted to teach children with disabilities. As my college career advanced, I started questioning my decision. I wasn't getting into the classes I needed, I wasn't getting the experiences that I needed, and I kept asking myself why I wanted to do this. Did I make the right choice? Did I choose the right college? What does God really have in store for me? I was questioning my decision to even want to work with children with disabilities.
One day I was wondering what I was going to do that following summer. My roommate tried to get me to work at a YMCA camp in northern Indiana with her. Working online, I started researching camps and camp counselor jobs. On a whim, I searched for a camp for people with disabilities. I ended up at the Friendship Ventures website, and I looked into applying.
I found out that the camp serves everyone with disabilities. That kind of freaked me out because I knew that there were kids with disabilities, but I never thought about the kids growing up to be adults with disabilities. It simply did not cross my mind. I decided to give it a try. I have family in the Twin Cities so I figured if I didn't like camp, I could just leave.
My first week there was an eye opener. I was in Wasie (my favorite) cabin, with a group of older women. The first night there were tornadoes in the area and I was ready to call my aunt to come get me. What made me stay was a camper putting her arms around me as we sat huddled in the hallway, telling me that it was OK because she would pray for me. Then she started to sing a song and the rest of the campers chimed in. My heart melted and I knew I had made a good decision to come to camp.
That summer flew by, but I will never forget it. I miss all the people I met that first summer, including one of my all-time best friends, who’s from Australia, at camp. I went back to school that fall confident in my chosen profession. The experience proved to me that I have a knack for working with people who have disabilities. Without that summer experience, I don't know if I would be as good a teacher as I am today. I take a lot of what I learned that summer and apply it to my everyday life.
I loved camp so much I came back the next summer to do it all over again. Now that I am teaching special education, I realize that what I learned at camp, I could never have learned in a classroom. I still talk about camp just about every day. I still pull out pictures of my two summers there. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry over my memories. I know that I made a difference in those campers’ lives in the short week that I spent with them.
All I can say is thank you to the Friendship Ventures family for providing the opportunity for people with disabilities to experience a summer of fun. And thank you to Friendship Ventures for marking my heart forever.
Friendship Ventures is a non-profit agency that creates unique educational, recreational and social opportunities for people of all ages with mental retardation and other developmental disabilities. We also offer conference and retreat services and professional team-building programs to the communities we serve. Friendship Ventures operates Camp Friendship near Annandale, MN and Eden Wood Center in Eden Prairie, MN.