August 12, 2006

As soon as children and teenagers are done with their yearly exams they start planning how to spend the coming summer months. Sometimes this translates into outings and trips with families, travelling abroad to new places and climes and meeting with relatives. However, mostly because of the extended number of days available for themselves, many children consider spending these days with friends, peers and people from the same age group as them. And so in order to make the most of their holidays and to avoid troubling anyone’s family unnecessarily, many youngsters decide to go to summer camps.

A lot of children and teenagers enrol in summer camps which are designed to include a variety of activities which might not be practical during the usual daily grind of routine school life. Camping is not strictly confined to hiking, campfires, horse-riding, gun-firing or other such activities alone. For there are camps for specialised tasks as well, like camps for arts, music, computers and even for educational purposes as well. So in summer camps can be found a good mix of entertainment and information if one is looking for both.

 A summer camp is basically a North-American phenomenon and has been in vogue since the mid 1800s, the first one being founded by Frederick W. Gunn in 1861. They are known as “sleepaway camps” when campers spend their nights camping, otherwise if campers go back home each night, these are termed “day camps”. Most of these camps also hire adult supervisors or counsellors for the campers. These counsellors guide activities and ensure the safety of campers and are quite young themselves being mostly in their late teens or early twenties. They also help children to adjust to the new, changed circumstances especially if a child misses home, being away from his family for so long.

Some summer camps focus on education-related activities only. These educational summer camps are often confused with summer schools, but there is an obvious difference. The former are run by colleges and universities for children belonging to Junior or Senior High school but do not necessarily offer school credit and often focus more on non-academic activities. All of this is quite opposite to what a summer school is designed – strictly for studing.

On a global level, this year a total of twelve Pakistani children were selected for participation in a ‘Seeds of Peace programme’ in Maine, USA. Six boys and six girls from five different schools in Lahore were chosen to attend the summer camp programme which began on June 26 and went on till July 20. Seeds of Peace is a New York-based NGO that brings together children from various conflict regions for a six-week period that aims to promote peacemaking and conflict resolution skills among these students.

  At the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine, students work together to accomplish tasks and are encouraged to talk about the issues that divide their nations.

They live together, share meals and engage in various summer camp activities, including playing sports, going through obstacle courses and creating art projects. Thus we see that summer camps can be used for good purposes too.


 

Come summer and children flock towards summer schools. What’s the hype about these places one would ask? Well, for some it would be just another place to have fun but for others it is an opportunity to brush up certain skills that they wouldn’t have time to do otherwise.  A number of local hotels and private institutes offer a variety of courses that range from painting, music and games to writing skills, cooking, self grooming and beauty. The packages offered range roughly from Rs3, 000 - Rs8, 000. Some hotels also offer discounts to schools and siblings. Not only do these classes help develop certain talents in a child, they play a very important role in developing the child’s personality as well. Here children develop inter-personal and communication skills. Even shy children learn to overcome their constraints and intermingle with each other.  The summer packages offered at various cultural centres are slightly different from the ones available at various hotels. For example at the PACC, stress is laid upon enhancing the writing and speaking skills of children in the English language through fun and games. Other language learning institutes also offer language courses for children.  Most of the local hotels that organise summer camps stress the need for coaching children in various sports too. Besides the local hotels that organise various summer camps, there are some people who train children in specific skills.  Mrs Shah who runs a Yoga Centre and offers classes to children during summer was of the view that the rise in awareness about fitness, has contributed greatly to a steady increase in children wanting to learn Yoga. Mr Yousef Ali who provides scuba diving classes for children as young as six years of age feels that children enjoy these sessions very much and that most of them are extremely talented and learn very quickly.  Various art schools also offer classes for children during summer; here the courses usually cover a range of activities from painting and sculpting to photography and film-making.  Besides the summer packages mentioned above, a few community centres also offer courses for children. Here, the fee structure is nominal as a result it caters to all strata of society. Different parishes arrange activities for children every summer too. These sessions, however, are meant exclusively for parish members. Keeping children busy in a constructive manner is what these centres do. However, some also feel that more than being a centre of learning these centres have become a fashion statement.

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