senor

you know the one thing that always makes your first day or so at camp easier? takes away the homesickness? comfort food. but it takes a special kind of person to put so much love and care and joy into every meal so that you always feel at home.

the other  night a very beloved member of our camp family passed away. our old cook jonas. jonas was the man that everyone loved. it was impossible to feel anything less than the greatest affection for him. his joy and passion for not only the food but for those who would be eating it was touching to say the least. jonas has always been a large part of my life even though he was only here for the summer camp season. i remember being younger and popping my head up over the serving counter to be greeted with a great big smile and "heyyy muchachaaaa" (even now i hear the words in my head exactly as he said them. i will never forget how that sounded). he would smile down at me and then vanish for a moment and often returned with a tidbit from the kitchen. then after yet another smile and a wink he would turn back to the work at hand singing to himself " bum ba ba dee do ba ba"

as i grew older i learned to appreciate him more and more, and when i started studying spanish in fifth grade i found a way to connect with "the senor" in one of his own languages. Every summer after that I did my best to converse with him in spanish, which aside from being fun was also what helped me reach the level of fluency I have today. jonas was one of the biggest parts of camp. he wasn't just the cook he was a friend, and a father figure. while sad that I will never see him again I know that wherever he is now, he is cooking up some of the best food ever made and smiling down upon all his muchachos and muchachas, just as his picture smiles down upon the serving counter in the dining hall, a tribute to a man who will always be missed and thought of with great affection.

te extrano senor. siempre estoy su muchacha <3

it's been a while hasn't it??

well. i thought i was gonna be able to actually keep this thing going on a regular basis. i suppose not....
last time i wrote i was telling you about the "wedding campers" and the aftermath of Irene.  since then we've gotten a temporary road ( and i love that thing to pieces let me tell you!) and we're currently working on digging out the brook to have a spot for the new culvert. this means that hopefullywithin a week or so we'll start building our NEW BRIDGE!!!! this one meant to last.
while everything that's happened due to irene has been exciting, i has put a damper on the off season festivities.
a few years ago( 5 i think) we started this thing called the Walk-A-Thon ( iskyla= hike or walk or something like that) to help raise money for camp. It's usually a pretty big even with around 100 people or so who come to spend columbus day weekend in the vermont foliage and see friends and family, all of whom are part of the great big Neringa family. they walk a loop through the town ( unfortunately it's usually in the rain. the weather tends to do this to us) and return to camp later in the afternon. throughout the day we roasta pig in a pit we make in the driveway, and later that night... we feast!! then comes te fun part. the party!!!! live music til 3 in themorning??? oh yes!
the adults all dance through the night while the teens are left to their own devices, and the younger children attempt to get some sleep throughout th noise.
now the older i get the more i enjoy this event. wh,y you may ask? simply because i can stay out later.
one thing that the camp goers never see to realize is that the building where they hold their dances and parties... is about 30 feet from my house. and the band itself is about 40 feet from my bedroom. this, ladies and gentlemen is NOT a pleasant experience when you're so tired you can't move and you just want to curl up and hibernate for a good ten hours. but that's not the point. anyway. that's the basic description of the walk--thon. now this year because we weren't sure whether or not we'd have a sufficient bridge, it was cancled. this bummd a lot of people out. HOWEVER!!!! Neringa people do not give up that easily. so the cool thing to do over columbus day weekend thisyear was a VIRTUAL WALK-A-THON!!!
which personally i thought was a fabulous idea. I didn't have or attend a virtual walk-a-thon, simply because i was here... but some camp people met up in diffferent places and had their own celebrations.
you can't stop the camp spirit!!!!
questions or comments?
feel free!
but please, be nice

the off season is stil interesting

so i'm sure you all know about hurricane irene and the damage it did to new england. well it hit us here in southern vermont pretty hard. the road crews have been doing an excellent job of getting things up and running and i appreciate that very much.
but what does irene have to do with camp?
at the moment, quite a lot. the weekend irene hit there was a wedding being held here(yes these things DO hapen at camp on occassion) i was helping out by doing dishe,s cleaning the bathrooms, taking out the trash, all the little things people take for granted. saturday night during dinner the rain started and the guests were okay by that. sure it puta slight damper on things, but they made themost of what they had. the smart guests decided to leave saturday night, while others remained hoping to spend one more day in vermont. well those people got a little bit more than they bargained for. sunday morning, due to the excessive amounts of rain, our culvret gave out, stranding 105 wedding guests here.
that was bad... and about 3 hours later the power went.
lets just say that things around camp were pretty hectic for a while. no power, no phone, no road...
those of us kids who live here in marlboro always joke about being stranded in the midle of nowhere, but this time we really were. there were holes 20 ft wide in rt 9, all the dirt roads up here were practically non existent.

now normally when there's a group of people here, you never know what to expect. usually they aren't the kind of people who have experienced power outages lasting more than a day. here in vermont, we've gone for a week without power before and that's cool with us. sure it sucks that you can't take a shower ( in my opinion that's the worst part) but we deal. for these people sometimes it's a little bit harder. we once had a group here over thanksgiving break when the power went out for ohh i think it was about 10 or so hours, and after four they were coming and knocking on our door asking us to fix it. that annoys me. there is no way for us to fix it you just have to wait it out. i was glad that the "wedding campers", as they became known, took things relatively well. sure they were bummedand a bit frusturated that they couldn't get out, but they made it work.
they pulled together and had meetings, started offering classes, and even had "Sporta diena", sports day, a camp tradition. meanwhile, slowly but steadily we were getting people out. wednesday, 3 days after the storm we finally got the last of the "wedding campers" out.
questions or comments? feel free! but please, be nice!

hello mudah, hello faddah...

sooooooo if you're seeing this you probably either know me, or google searched summer camps and this came up somewhere on the 300th or so search page. and obviously you felt like maybe it was worth checking out. so thanks!
i guess i should do a litte background on what this is, and who i am for anybody who did locate me through the google search method :)
lets start with me. basically i live in the middle of nowhere. BUT i also live at a summer camp. hence, camp is my life. i've been living at a sumer camp in vermont since i was 2 so it's al i've ever known. and for those of you wondering " wait. do you live there all year?" the answer is yes. i'm here 24/7/52.
 for those of you are are counselors and are the ones who actually gave me the idea to do this, this will hopefully let you seemore of wat hapens when nobody's here except my family, and will allow you to see more of my perspective as someone caught in the middle.
i'd love to kep writing but unfortunately i am a procrasinator and have an essay due in about 9 hours and my eyes are starting to shut...
but don't worry i'll be back. there's always something going on here!
labanaktis!!!