When it rains at camp, YOU GET WET

...And boy did it ever rain today!

Greetings from the Wisconsin Lions Camp in Rosholt WI, where I am spending my summer as a Nursing Assistant! The Wisconsin Lions Camp serves adults and children with disabilities ranging from blind/visually impaired and deaf/hard of hearing to cognitively disabled and diabetic.

I arrived here on Saturday and we've been doing staff training since. We get our first week of campers (blind/visually impaired adults) on Sunday. They will stay through next Friday and then the fun starts all over again with new campers!

I'm working on taking some pictures to post so I can show you where I am and what I've been doing. The camp is beautiful. I'm enjoying working and bonding with the staff here as well. Everyone is here because they WANT to be, not because they HAVE to be. What a concept, hey?

Serving the population that we serve, I've been learning a bit of sign language, something I've always wanted to do. Three of our counselors are deaf/hearing impaired and all attended Lions Camp as campers when they were kiddos. They're very patient with us hearing folk as we learn. It's a long process. The sentence structure is very different from written/spoken English.

For example, if I want to ask you where you are from, in verbal English it looks/sounds like this:

"Where are you from?"

In ASL, it looks like this:

You...from...where?

There is no verb tense (past/present/future), so when you want to say I went to the store, the ASL form ends up being: Yesterday...I...go...store. It's very interesting!

I am quickly learning that the hours I keep at college do not fly well at camp. I wake up quite a bit earlier here which puts so many more hours into my day! Of course that means bedtime comes a little sooner too, but by 10:00pm I'm done tuckered out!

I will keep this blog up as much as possible over the summer and I encourage you to follow me and see what I'm up to. Hope all is well in all of your various corners of the world!

~SJ