Camp, part 3

[parasitegirl]

By Thursday evening I came to a horrible realization. Excluding time inside toilet stalls, I had not been 100% alone since Tuesday evening. There is no private space when you are teaching at a summer camp. You sleep with others. You bath and shower with others. You eat with others. And the moment a child sees you walking away from dinner prep, they follow you.

 

I need a certain amount of my own space. No one is ever surprised to learn that I was an only child. The thought that I hadn’t been alone for over 24 hours and would probably have another 20 or so more peopled hours to go until I could be alone in my own shower and bed…filled me with grumpy worn out dread.

 

This kid looked like I felt, so I took his picture.
 
We had multiple hours and random objects with which to entertain the children outdoors once they had built the fires and started preparing the food. Let me be specific. The they preparing the food and fires were the children. Small children with lighter fluid and poking sticks are scary. Small girls carrying large kitchen knives, even scarier. Yeah, I laughed when Jimmy mentioned how his little girls were freaking him out with the knives, and then I saw my Peaches (my two boys were fire making and covered in soot by then) I now know, little girls with knives fucking creep me out!

 

The boys finished making fire and went off to torture insects for a while when I came to the realization that I was exhausted, not alone, and that camp might never end. I began sending pathetic text messages to Wataguy.

 

And then, as the first pots began to simmer My Peaches and I had time together…goodie…While I got along with the two older girls, the other four continued torturing me and abusing my monkey pencil case, an activity that they could all agree on. Once they found out I was a vegetarian they had decided to call me by a similar sounding word, obatarian…An obatarian is a type of old bitchy fat-assed pushy Japanese women. It is not a nice thing to call a gal. And they also latched on to Wataguy’s name, which I had offered up in panic when being quizzed about if I was a pathetic obatarian spinster….Every male over the age of 17 at the camp became “Wataguy” until Jacob, one of the married councilors, stepped in and claimed to be Wataguy. For the next day or so we proceeded to make “love-love” faces to the girl’s delight and disgust. The girls then wove a constant soap opera…Jimmy (who I explained was really my long lost brother) became Wataguy’s brother…every councilor because related to one or the other of us.

 

And it was under the screams of Obatarian and the saga of Wataguy that I discovered my thus un-tapped coping with children mechanism…utter, unadulterated, immaturity.  If I was going to be an obatarian they would be…Yucky Monkey-Butts. And so, under a barrage of mean spirited Japanese questions I simply replied “what’s up, monkey butt?” over and over again until they gave up… and then I began to teach them the only English a small child really wants to know…immature stuff to call each other…Cockroaches. Monkey-butts….and the adjectives Yucky and icky.

 

Much happened in the 2-3 hours before we ate. Insects were killed. Peaches became the Yucky-Monkey-Butts. I played some free-form games involving balls and Frisbees. Amechi (the American Muslim) and I truly offended some lady by attempting to get two pots of the many many many curry pots, to be meat free (Jimmy lists watching the two of us bartering for food we could eat as the most entertaining part of his day. It was a more complicated affair then you can imagine.)

 

This is what good children look like, none of these are Peaches.

And the Sticker-mongers cleared me out of my stash of stickers.

See this child? She wants your stickers…as does this one…

While my team was insulting me and each other the other kids were accosting adults and asking them English questions in exchange for the bling-bling of a tag full of stickers.

 

And most of them only knew one question, do you like…?

 

Do you like apple?

Do you like dogs?

Do you like rabbit? (Children do not enjoy being told, in Japanese, yes rabbits are tasty…they will ask you the same question again until they get the yes or no they want and a goddamned sticker)

 

This gets pretty old pretty quickly. We had to start cutting off  do you like questions and got..

 

Is this your juice?

Is this your….friend?

Is this your…?

 

Then it was mealtime. Rather uneventful except I have learned that seven year old Japanese children are unquenchable curry pits. Team Angel had to be cut off after 4ths…I only had 1 ½ servings. Knowledgeable councilors told me that Japanese elementary school kids tend to over-eat (positively binging) when ever “curry day” rolls around on the school menu. 

 

Night fell and a bonfire was erected and set ablaze by the Fire Queen and Fire King, two male councilors all gussied up in silver polyester robes, wigs, and crowns. My team was in fine form. Without prompting, as the Fire King and Queen passed our area of the circle, they stared screaming “Yucccccccky!!!!!”

 

Coming soon, part 4