Here's an interesting article: Interned Boy Scouts Look Back
I don't know why, but it really struck me. Just because a group of people are locked up together and forced to live in tents and shacks doesn't mean they stop living their lives. In fact, many Japanese boys in the camp joined the Boy Scouts because their parents thought it would help them assimilate. Why they wanted to assimilate into a culture that locked them up in the first place is beyond me, but I guess it was the only choice they had. It's uplifting to see that some good came out of it, and it's cool that they all got together after all these years. They obviously gained a lot from their experiences with the Boy Scouts and turned a terrible human rights disgrace into something valuable and meaningful.
Speaking of Scouting and camps, since it's now summer, I've been reminiscing about summer camp. I went to Girl Scout overnight camp, and while I didn't care about earning badges (most girls in the girl scouts preferred to make candles and lanyards, not canoe and hike) I was one of the outdoorsy willing participants who got my first taste of sleeping in a tent in the woods, building a fire, getting dirty and mosquito-bitten, and waking up early to go swimming or canoeing in the cold-ass lake. It made me appreciate the outdoors in a way I never would have by riding bikes and playing in the swimming pool with my friends. The first time I felt a sense of spirituality connected with nature was during some sort of ceremony in the Green Cathedral in the woods on the land near camp. I went to camp there for two weeks every summer between 2nd and 8th grade, and come August 1st every year, I still feel like I should be trekking off to Wild Rose, Wisconsin.
That was just my experience, but other people have gained a lot from summer camp as well. In fact, Michael Eisner, Disney guru, said that he grew more as a person from his experience at summer camp than from college or business school. He just wrote a book about it called Camp (read the amazon.com review here). Camp is all about teamwork, learning how to live in close quarters with people you don't know in an environment that forces people to learn some basic survival skills. Sometimes putting on a wet swimsuit at 6:30 am to wash the campfire smell out of your hair with dirty lake water or sharing the best remedies for mosquito bites makes you realize that some things are just more important in life. The WWII internment camps were no romp in the woods, but they too taught people how to work together as a community, make the best of what they had, and learn something new. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating internment camps, but I am advocating the whole summer camp experience. On a purely volunteer basis.
