Thursday, August 02, 2007

The Camp Week Debacle

This actually happened Monday, but I had a problem with my internet (I had none) so its being posted now. This week is camp week. Camp week is when we take all the kids we've seen through summer outreach (or at least those that want to go) to camp for the day. It's an interesting mix of kids we have everyone from the city dwellers that just happened to have wandered to a local playground for summer program to the Upper Class my parents work all day and enrolled me in an enriching summer program at school kids. We try to sort them out by days to minimize the trauma for everyone. We always expect some problems, but Monday morning's experience takes the cake. There was a little issue with the buses (there were two of them instead of one and they left the first stop without the staff), but that wasn't the biggest issue.

At the last stop before heading off to camp, we loaded up the kids and checked them off our list when we realized we had three extra kids. There were several problems:
1) their parent was not present
2) they did not have permission slips
3) their parent was not answering the phone to give verbal permission
4) they only spoke Spanish
5) one of them was a boy and I work for the Girl Scouts

Obviously, these kids are not going to camp. Carmen (our spanish speaking staff member) was supposed to go to camp that day, but we had to keep her back to help with these kids. The bus left. Carmen and I are there with three kids and do not know what to do with them.

Do you know your address? (thinking we can somehow get these kids home)
Yo no se --that's I don't know in Spanish
How did you get here?
Translated version -- Tessy brought us on the bus (who the hell Tessy is, we never found out)

We finally realized they went to the school where the bus stop was so we went in and convinced the secretary to give us their address. We loaded the three kids up in my car (which we shouldn't have done without booster seats...shhh, but our other option was?) We proceeded to the scariest street in Harrisburg that I have ever been to and I have been to some pretty scary places. There were flowers and balloons on the street corner where a guy had been recently shot to death and the building beside where the kids lived had all the windows busted out and plywood for a door. There was scary people milling around. Turns out mom was inside asleep.

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