A big part of camp has been the English classes that we as a team have had the privilege of teaching. To be honest, I was nervous to be in front of the campers with no idea what to teach, but the planning team put together the best lesson plans ever and everybody was fully engaged every class. For me, the most meaningful time was when we were decorating the notebooks we had taken our notes in. I had told them to rip out pictures of things that they liked or represented them and right away they grabbed magazines and flipped through the pages. I got a little anxious when I saw that the magazines were either National Geographic or makeup magazines because I was having a hard time finding pictures that weren’t advertisements or animals attacking each other. As I was working, I saw the well talked about Elvis ripping a nicotine patch advertisement out of the magazine, and to my amazement, pasting the ENTIRE thing on his front cover, with nothing else on top. The ad was a smiling young man raising his baby above his head. Elvis explained to us that he chose that picture because in two or three years he was hoping to be a father. The little of Elvis’s story I knew was this: when Elvis came to his first camp, he was scared out of his mind because he had never been in an environment like that. Now he’s the guy with the biggest smile, giving the biggest hugs and singing with the loudest voice. Pat then also later explained that for the orphans, having a family was the impossible ultimate dream. That dreaming for a family and believing it was possible is amazing. There are a few couples helping lead camp with young children. Both parents were orphans, and they have to learn how to handle a baby because they never had an example in their life. The orphans will tell you how cool it is to watch the little ones learn to talk because in the orphanage a lot of orphans didn’t talk until much later because they had nobody to talk to. It was so inspiring to hear Elvis’s dream and that he was hoping to achieve it.

-Ali Pollard