By: Tawfiq, Community Engagement Coordinator
ETCBC kids camp has come and gone and it was my first time working with a high number of children at one time. Very young children are not something that I am very keen on so this was a huge challenge for me. The reason for this is that children at that age range, typically under around eight years old, tend to be chaotic, unpredictable and uncontrollable by nature. This was a challenge for me unpredictability and chaos when working with others is something that I have a difficult time with. The first instance of chaos we had to face was when we realized that everything we had planned for that specific day was incompatible with the kids and needed to be scrapped. We then had to come up with new activities right there on the spot. While everything worked out in the end, that period of “oh no, what do we do?” was extremely stressful. This along with the younger kids and some volunteers being varying degrees of uncooperative was a massive barrier to overcome.
Overall the camp went smoothly and it was a positive learning experience for myself. If I could change some things about the experience one thing would be having more time with the kids. We only had one hour per day with them for our session and I did not feel like we made meaningful connections with the kids. Though a small handful of kids were an exception. Secondly I would try to encourage the volunteers to actually participate. The volunteers are also still young and range from twelve to eighteen but I don’t feel that this is an excuse for not fulfilling their role. This is of course a difficult task as every volunteer is different and won’t respond to the same training in the same way. Of course, there were exceptions.
As for things I learned about myself, I learned that I do not handle being in a position of authority by myself very well. This only happened once but when it did It was almost a complete failure. The pressure of the spotlight is something I can usually force myself through despite anxieties but I am especially not used to having the spotlight with a position of power. This will be something that I need to work on for the future.