Tales From a Summer Camp: Jonah

I’m all out of Tales from a 7-11, but I’ve had a few requests for more stories, so I’m going to reach back to another job that I once held for a new series called “Tales From a Summer Camp.”

One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people.

We counselors got about a week of training before the kids showed up. There were a lot of silly team-building exercises but also some more practical training about stuff like how to talk to kids about violence in their neighborhoods. There’d been a shooting the week before, and we were warned that many of the kids would know the shooter, the victim, or both, and they wanted us to be prepared.

I was not prepared for “Jonah”. He’d just turned 8 and was the youngest in my group of rising third-graders, but he was by far the most mature. He wasn’t from Cambridge at all but was in fact Israeli. His mother was at Harvard for the semester, and he’d ended up in the camp because she needed something to do with him while she taught or studied or whatever.

Jonah wasn’t familiar with American TV or music and didn’t share the love of bathroom humor that most boys that age have. He always looked on somewhat aloofly when they played tag or giggled over Eminem lyrics. On our first day, he was sitting by himself on the bus, so I sat next to him and talked to him for a while. That turned out to be a mistake, because he never made much of an effort to make friends with the other kids, preferring either to talk to me or to sit by himself.

I encouraged him to go play with the other kids, but he told me they didn’t understand him and that he thought they were immature. I try to be honest with kids, so I told him that might be true, but he could try to play with them anyway. He wasn’t interested.

One day, we were out at the playground when he asked if he could use the bathroom. I got up to walk inside with him, and he looked up at me very matter-of-factly and said, “You know, I used to live in a war zone. You don’t have to walk me to the bathroom.”

“I agree, but the rules say I have to walk with you, so let’s walk.” Again with the honesty.

Jonah had to leave camp early to return to Israel. I asked him if he was looking forward to going home.

He pondered this for a moment before answering, again very matter-of-factly. “I’m excited to see my friends, but I’m kind of worried about suicide bombers.” I didn’t have anything to say to that.