A Life Experience I Thought I’d Missed

Some of my 10-year-old "Turtles" after our scavenger hunt on the mountainside.

Teaching English at a Summer Camp at Uludag

(A faint chant starts in Turkish somewhere in the back of the dining area, with its views of the mountains below. It grows slowly louder, until all the dinner tables erupt into the climactic chorus:)

Gel-e-ce-gin

yil-diz-lar!

Yil-diz-lar!

The nostalgic chant reverberates through my head as I rejoin the hot, boring adult world back in Istanbul after spending two weeks with campers at “Camp Future Stars” (Gelecegin Yildizlari) up on Uludag, a sprawling, 2000-meter high ski resort area home to one of the finest kids’ summer camps in Turkey during its lazy summer offseason.

The first term of Future Stars features kids from ages 10 to 13. They are from more well-to-do families in Turkey, but they aren’t spoiled brats that I might have feared. I felt a genuine bond with them upon departure. My first experience teaching at a summer camp was a beautiful one, even if fraught with problems such as lack of supplies and miscommunications that didn’t seem to befit a summer camp of its stature.

Sunsest over the summit

The co-owner, Fahrettin, one of two brothers who started the camp in 1989, told me that there are approximately 100 “official” summer camps in Turkey that are affiliated with global summer camp organizations, but a lot more camps run by municipalities. Most of the 15,000 or so camps in the US seem to have a rustic, Puritanical, get-back-to-the roots mission, eschewing a lot of modern conveniences for outdoor activities, overnight camps and the like. On the other hand, camps in Europe and Russia apparently have more modern conveniences and are more like collective holidays than what we think of summer camps. Life at this Turkish camp is kind of a combination of the two. There were two disco nights and classrooms were in hotel rooms. There was one overnight camping trip, but it was approximately 200 meters up the mountainside next to a ski lift. But the food was a lot healthier than camps I had been to in the US: Lots of salad and yogurt, and classes took turns on “shift” serving meals and clearing dishes. And because of Fahrettin’s love of basketball, there was a lot of roundball action in addition to games like archery.

I was never a camp kid. I went to two summer camps in my youth, once to Camp Kaesta, in the Southern Oregon Cascades, when I was 9 years old, then to B’nai B’rith Camp, a Jewish youth camp on the Oregon Coast, when I was 11. The experience at Ka-esta was a week long, when I had a terrible paranoia about contracting Lyme’s disease, and when there was one torturous night of homesickness when I couldn’t be consoled. My campmates at the Jewish camp, meanwhile, had all been together since they were 8 years old and formed a tight clique which they made clear early on that I wouldn’t be a part of. I was made fun of by these spoiled, Seattle Mercer Island types with few allies to count on except for one overweight boy who was also a new camper that year.

Ski run at night

So it was mainly financial reasons that led me to raise my hand to be a teacher at Camp Future Stars (Gelecegin Yildizlari), but it was one of the best decisions I’ve made this past year. The fresh mountain air, the creativity from the kids in the classroom (space was out theme, so students created things like anthems, flags, aliens, etc). When the kids performed at the end – to show off their planets, flags, aliens, etc. – I felt like a nervous and proud father. And teary goodbye hugs as the kids boarded coach busses back to the city, I too felt pangs of sadness, for what seemed to be a long two weeks at first, turned out to be over in the blink of an eye.

I wasn’t a camp kid. But I am a camp grown up.

(Note: while the weather in Istanbul is sweltering in summer, hitting 30 degrees, and humid,  it never got above 22 while I was there, and often nights dipped down to 12 degrees. Sweaters and long jons are recommended anytime one visits Uludag)