Sometimes the most powerful learning experiences come in the most unexpected ways.

More than fifty years ago, I was accepted as a junior volunteer counsellor at what was then called Bolton Camp for Underprivileged Kids. In late June I went for an afternoon’s interview in a downtown Toronto office, where a supervisor sat at a desk while I filled out forms and handed over my reference from my Girl Guide Captain, after which I was given a sheet about basic camp protocol. Although I was only a very inexperienced seventeen, I signed to agree that for two weeks I would be in charge of ten girls, aged five and six, who would be chosen from inner city schools. Then, because my session would not take place until the last two weeks of August, I forgot about it for most of my summer.

However, days before I was to take a bus to the camp I grew rattled and nervous. The reality hit me that I would suddenly be thrust into an unfamiliar role of responsibility. While some of the program would be structured and run by senior counsellors, not only would I be responsible like a den mother, I would also be expected to invent my own amusements for the girls, such as crafts and nature walks.

By the time I lugged my duffel bag off the bus, I felt thrown in at the deep end. I was mostly on my own to do the best I could. For someone as sheltered as I, much of the experience was shocking. A few of my raggedy bunch had never felt grass on their bare feet. Familiar only with asphalt, they bent to pet the shaggy greenness.

At Bolton in those days mothers were encouraged to accompany their daughters to camp if they could, sharing plain, unpainted cabins with the girls. But astonishingly, the country I so loved was a terrifying experience for them. Horrified by the foreignness, they couldn’t wait to escape back to the city. It’s so quiet, they muttered. What do you do for fun? they shrugged. Most of the mothers escaped back to the city as soon as they could. In fact, one of them was so homesick she even had to be driven back the same night she arrived. When asked about her daughter Linda, the mother only muttered “Oh, she’ll be all right.” And Linda nodded seriously at me.

If the mothers couldn’t get used to camp, I discovered that their daughters took to it immediately. And indeed resilient, resourceful Linda was more than all right, eagerly making new friends and throwing herself into the simple crafts I showed her—mostly things I had learned from Girl Guides. Often, to my amusement, I even discovered that the sturdiest of the girls mothered me, as if caring for adults was natural to them. Grown-ups couldn’t be counted on to know what was best to do. All I had to do was to ask I wonder what I’d better do about… and they clustered around me, offering smart, practical suggestions until I pulled myself together again.

Generally the camp was well and tightly organized, with programs morning and afternoon, including the most popular swimming classes, something new for my girls. For the most part, though, we volunteer counsellors were expected to cope on our own and certainly there was no Google to advise me. I made us trails through the woods with signs from fragments of birchbark, or patterns of twigs, or I invented scavenger hunts. We sang silly Guide songs, like There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Henry after one of our drinking water buckets sprang a leak. On hot afternoons, they were charmed when we gathered around shady picnic tables and draggled paint brushes dripping with bright red, yellow and blue poster paints across newsprint—art also being unfamiliar to them. It took oh so little to please them or interest them.

After supper, on nights when there wasn’t a group campfire, we told each other stories, some of which I wished I’d never heard, including ones about absent fathers who were sure to be visiting soon and who would bring us all presents when they did, but others of which made us double over with laughter. (It didn’t take much to make us all laugh. We needed it.)

But for all the fun we had together, I often felt stretched to my very limits.

The head counsellor had cautioned us to take advantage of any time off we could get. We volunteers would find that we needed all the breaks we could get, she said, which was certainly true.

At night I put those of my girls who were camping without mothers to bed in a long wooden dormitory where they would be roughly supervised overnight by one of the few paid staff. And that was one of the times when I knew how deeply I needed any breaks I could scrounge. But how could I separate my self from this cheery, brave, inventive bunch? This was specially hard in the dormitory, where I was shadowed by six year old, developmentally-challenged Mary who clung to me like a kitten. I never did find out who this little one belonged to. Her satchel held no chocolate bars from home nor comic books. She never got the odd postcard, as the others did.

At night, all Mary’s terrors came to a head for her, and she knew she would wet her mattress, and someone would be mad at her yet again. Ah gee, she muttered hopelessly, Nothing I do is ever right. Through the two weeks of camp, despairingly, always flapping her broken sandals and scuffing behind me and the others, she failed and failed again, just as she knew she would. I didn’t even know where to begin to help her. And I knew if I didn’t escape, my precious time off would vanish.

Sometimes, when I headed out of the dorm in the twilight I went to sit with Jane’s mother. Privately, I acknowledged that pale, fair Jane was my pet. She was the only child whose mother stayed with her through the whole camp, often sitting on the front steps of their cabin smoking. The first morning, she had taken me aside to warn me that Jane had Epilepsy. She sometimes had scary fits, the mother told me. She could die. And yes, I saw that Epilepsy was noted on Jane’s slim file as a caution, but what was that? There was nobody to tell me what to do, what to watch out for. I grabbed the Senior Counsellor: Just do the best you can. If she has a seizure try to find the staff nurse. But she’s very busy, so try not to bother her. I don’t think they would have sent her here if they were very worried.” The fear about the impossible job of keeping the girls safe began to nag me.

Those nights, frail Jane sat hunched up between her mother and me, her knees up to her chin, and I tidied her long, fair hair while we listened as her mother told me matter-of-factly about her attempts to commit suicide with a whole bottle of aspirin after which she had to go to hospital and have her stomach pumped. Around us the late-summer crickets sang. How could anyone want not to live no matter how hard it was?

Other nights, the more-knowing volunteer counsellors from one of Toronto’s private schools snuck off along a trail to liaison with the male counsellors whose cabins were far distant from ours. Tired and confused, feeling tested to my limits, instead I climbed Bolton’s high rolling hills in the twilight, surrounded by the white cups of the Queen Anne’s lace, fascinated by their intricacy, discovering the consolation of beauty. Never before had I noticed just how enchanting they were.

                         **

Meanwhile, my testing became harder.

Near the end of my two weeks, in the middle of the night I heard sounds of violent heaving from one after another of the three counsellors who shared my cabin. Very soon I too was clawing urgently for a waste basket. Over and over and over again. How could we be so sick? There was no one to help, no one to know. By dawn I literally crawled to the nurse’s cabin, where I fetched the startled nurse to come to our cabin, which was stinking of vomit, where the other three sprawled helplessly out of their beds. Startled, she diagnosed food poisoning, dosed us with Gravol, and sent all of us back to bed for the whole morning.

But sick as I was, oh how I missed my girls. Nothing was as interesting without them. As quickly as it had come, the nausea disappeared, and in the early afternoon I went out to find them hanging around a big maple, where they clustered about me, offering food they had stolen for me from the cafeteria, (predictably little Mary’s was hopelessly squashed from being stuffed in her pocket) or different leaves they had collected because they knew I would be interested, and oh, they exclaimed, just that morning Jane, understandably the most fearful of them all, had learned to swim without even touching her feet on the bottom.

The last afternoon, the volunteer counsellors were each challenged to devise a play for our children which we would perform in front of the paid counsellors and the other groups and the few remaining mothers. What could I possibly do with such a mixed group? The plan which came to me was based on Noah’s Ark, with me as narrator, blanket costumes, eyebrow pencil and lipstick cadged from some of the counsellors,  and scope for lots of animals. (Do zebras wear lipstick?) Surprisingly, bursting with pride at the idea of performing, the girls took to it gamely, practising growling and hissing at each other as they went about their days.

We were ready and excited when disaster struck. Just as we were heading down the big hill to the rec hall, mountains of clouds boiled up. Faster than I could have imagined, a storm was brewing. Wicked lightning whipped across the sky; thunder echoed off the hills. What to do? We were out in the broad open, and it was too late to run back up to shelter. The rec hall seemed terrifyingly far away. Mary was threatening hysterics and kept plunging away from us, while brave Jane screamed and thought she finally was going to have a seizure. All hold hands. We’re going to have to run for it, I yelled, and we pelted down the hill as cascades of rain flooded around us.

But when we took our turn on the stage, the girls did me proud. There were enthusiastic, if soggy, tigers, ponies, a camel, and even lustily hissing snakes, and Mary, a lamb, managed to wander across the stage without tripping. After the songs and cake, we trooped back up the hill in radiant sunshine, clutching first prize ribbons.

**

The next day the buses came early. Though most of the girls were sad that their happy times were over, they also were looking forward to their homes and telling their families about their accomplishments and heading back to school to see their friends. They milled around me, hugging fiercely and then disappeared up the steps of the school bus which would take them back to the city.

But where was Jane? I found her at last, hiding behind the maple tree, not because she had any hope of staying behind, but more because she was bowed over with grief. Wordless, feeling like a traitor, I put my arm around her thin shoulders and led her to the bus where her mother was waiting.

**

As for me, I went home teetering between girlhood and adulthood. The experience had been too big. I had crossed a boundary which left me with very little to say to my parents or my high school friends.

What did I learn? I was pleased to discover that, when challenged, I could do far more than I had imagined.

I found how much I loved children as people.

I was reminded how much appreciating nature helps.

Nothing felt more important than caring for others, but that compassion also felt dangerous. Unable to set boundaries, I feared I would disappear forever inside their worlds. (In fact, boundaries have been something it has taken me a lifetime to learn.)

Having peered inside some of the hell of poverty for adults and children I knew I could never go back to my sheltered world. I knew too much. (Before long, I would learn much more about that.)

All the same, this caring work called to me. It felt far more real than the sheltered, if rigorous, world of school. (Later, unable to endure being cooped up in the university ghetto, I volunteered at the Kensington Market Settlement House, where there was more tough learning, but where I was instantly drawn into a dynamic immigrant community of 40 different nationalities)

My last lesson was how quickly people can become invisible.

Because I couldn’t forget my girls, I devised a plan to let them know they were not forgotten. For Christmas I got each one’s address from the charity’s office,* and I bought Chinese paper flowers, the kind which bloomed when dropped in water. I carefully addressed them and mailed them, brightening to think how pleased they would be by the little surprise. But two weeks later that door closed for me when every single one of my presents was returned to me by the Post Office, stamped Return to sender. Address unknown. In some cases, my small gifts had been forwarded more than once.

*Something which never would be permissible now.