Camp Top of the Pines AKA Camp Ghetto
Published by Johnny on January 04, 2010
Ok so I arrived on public bus and got picked up from the bus station by an older lady, very American and very Jewish who turned out to be the camp director, Sandra. She was in your face to say the least, although little did i know I would end up loving her and she would offer me a full time job in NYC however, in the beginning this wasn’t the case!
She drove me for an hour or so to the camp, during that hour the reality of what I was letting myself in for really hit home! I was worried that because I had been fired from my last camp that perhaps they wouldn’t be so keen to have me working there – this turned out to be quite a joke when, midway through the camp, one of the other American counsellors ( a 6″3 black dude) got picked up by the police because working at camp was breaking his probation regulations haha!!
During that journey I was breaking out in a cold sweat! Sandy kept stressin to me that this camp was very different to other camps I have been at and that these kids are sent here to escape the gang warfare in inner city New York. The only times these kids get out of Harlem is for camp in the summer. She was telling me that various kids has brother, uncles and fathers in jail or dead and that there will literally not be one white kid the entire summer – coming from a local town in Ireland that was a shock to the system, dont get me wrong I’m an open minded dude but suddenly being faced with trying to gain the respect of 400 kids from Harlem so they will listen to me when I tell them to go to bed at 9pm was a daunting prospect!!
I arrived and got shown to my accommodation for the next 9 weeks
Bunk 9 - my luxury accommodation
Bit of a change from the air-conditioned dorms from my last camps :S Ok, so I dumped my bag and met the other counsellors at camp – I guess there were maybe 70 in total. About 10 white Europeans and 40 Black Americans – I dont mean Barack Obama black, i mean freestyling, do-rag wearing, 50 cent, white-vest wearing black… i was intimidated!! 2 of the kitchen staff were actually in the crips, blue bandanas in the back pocket and everything. By the end of my time there we were good mates and they turned out to be top, top dudes (still gun wielding gang members, but cool nonetheless!)
Me and the kitchen crips
I’m from a pretty bad area in Northern Ireland and we certainly have our own problems with the whole protestant/catholic things, fights every weekend, single religion schools, bars etc but this was a very different scenario altogether. I went back to my bunk, the kids were coming the next day “oh shit, how the hell am I gonna last over 2 months here?!”. I was so certain that I was going to leave that I didn’t even unpack my bag for the first 6 days. And then came the kids…
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- Bunk 9 kids and me
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- Bunk 9 Representing
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- Shakim and Tamique
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- Me and the kitchen crips
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- Bunk 9 – my luxury accommodation
I was assigned a co-counsellor (J from Brooklyn – a beatboxing, body popping legend!) and 8 kids in the middle aged group. As I was apparently a camp veteran I was assigned the toughest group of kids haha! They were a little shocked to see some white dude telling them what to do and they were initially reluctant to listen to anyone – meeting all the other kids for the first time, showing off, having to take their do-rags off (camp rule – and they hated it!). At the end of the day though they are still 12 year old kids and being away from home for maybe the first time was tough for them, having none of their friends and trying to re-establish themselves is difficult, especially considering where they’re from. So that’s a bit of an intro into my time at Camp Top of the Pines (Vacamas) – I’ll go into it in more detail over the next week or so but i gotta go to bed – work tomorrow…
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HEYYY I WAS A CAMPER AT TOP IN 2011 TRIP1 WITH THE WINTER PRO… I HAD A LOT OF FUN I WOULD LIKE TO GO THIS SUMMER SAME TRIP1 AND MY FRIENDS TOO. TO RITE MY ANSWER HIT ME UP AT COREYHANDFORD@AOL.COM
wow corey, thats cool! where u at Vacamas?
Hey btw…A du-rag isn’t a “scarf type thing that wannabe gangsters wear on their heads”. I wear a du-rag for your information and I’m NOT nor am I TRYING to be a “gangster”. Don’t form a false perception if you’re not sure what the item in question is. A du-rag prevents people with braids (like me) or waves (look it up) from getting messed up. It’s not different then a white women wearing a scarf to sleep in so her hair doesn’t get messed up.
the connotations they carry are very different from women wearing a scarf Gambit, hence the campus wide banning of them. If they had no negative conceptions attached to them, then that wouldn’t be necessary.
I understand the rationale behind their existence, but society has brought them a long way from that
Yea man, I worked there unfortunately. Good thing I wasn’t a full time counselor though, as I got to get a 2 hour break out of the 6 hour days we did. It seems all the kids that are now grown love it, but the kids from the bunks when I was over there hated it and wanted to go home. A lot of fights between the kids lul!
I mean, there’s some good kids, you just have to work with them. If not, do what I did, beat them down! =P
most kids are good kids (admittedly not all of them though:P) so, no doubt, camps like this are great to let them be kids again, away from all the bravado! In my time, the kids and counsellors all had a ball!
erm, I know you won’t be surprised by this question Connor, but what is a “do-rag”?
lol, a scarf type thing that wannabe gangsters wear on their heads! ask Will, i think he wears them
Gee, if you were intimidated by black men with urban clothing at camp I wondered what you would have done had you boarded a train from 125th street in Harlem. Anyways, I can co-sign with the “Camp Ghetto”. I worked there for about a month from a summer youth employment program. Bunks, very nasty. Well, everything was nasty. Kids, horrid. You just have to….Hit them (don’t get caught however). I worked there this summer that passed, ’10. I’ll read the next articles, I like interesting opinions and documentaries.
hey Gambit,
u worked at Vacamas?! thats cool, one of the best summers of my life (if a little bit of a culture shock for a guy from a small town in ireland!) although i’m currently in Sudan so i guess i’m a little more open-minded now
thanks for the comments and try to ease off the mindless violence with the kids!!