Building trails
by Tim Martin, Group Work Supervisor
I'm walking trail right now. And if you look at this picture, it's pretty obvious where the trail is. I think pretty much anybody would be able to follow that trail. It's a little muddy, but easy to see. And I think, in some ways that's similar to what we do with our campers.
The trail that you're looking at in that picture wasn't there last August. Maybe there was a little bit of flagging tape, but that was it. I remember when Chief Andrew got here, at the end of August last year, and we raked that trail for the first time, trying to make it a little more obvious.
Since the boys arrived in September, we travelled that path many times a day, going back and forth between the Campsite and the Chuckwagon (dining hall). Every day, through rain or snow, dark or light, whether we’re tired or full of energy, we’ve followed that trail through the woods. And six months later, there’s no way you could miss it.
And it's kind of like our boys. We are constantly making trails and pathways with them in their lives.
When a boy comes to camp, he often has goals to change something. It might an inability to get up in the morning, or a habit of lashing out at others when he gets frustrated. He doesn’t know the way out of the tangles he’s caught in. It’s just the way he’s been living. He doesn’t know a better way.
So we slow things down, do life together, and start putting words on things.
“It sounds like you’re frustrated.” The first time we identify something, it’s kind of like flagging it for the first time.
In the course of our daily routines, it inevitably comes up again, and we talk about it. “You got pretty mad there and stomped off. What happened there?” Maybe that’s like raking it for the first time.
Just like building trails through the woods, we are walking with the boys as they build new skills. In the past, when the boy would have blown up, now he knows a new way to react. He stops, considers his actions, and takes the new pathway he’s built.
The weeks build on each other, and you keep doing life together. You talk about things, and explore better ways to react and handle situations. Like the new trail, they walk their new pathways lots of times. It takes practice but over time, it starts to become clear where the pathway is.
When you first make that trail, it sure doesn't feel comfortable or easy. But then you walk that trail, six times a day, every day. All of a sudden, it becomes almost like a highway.
That’s what we are able to offer these boys at camp: time and space to build new skills that will become like highways in their lives.
“I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them.” —Isaiah 42:16
