RL

RL is an abbreviation for Real Life. As opposed to life through cell phones or online profiles. RL refers to the real world, where things aren't perfect and people aren't as ready to say whatever they feel like. Real life can be amazing, terrible, ugly, and perhaps completely unfair.

I learned that last summer, when I volunteered as a camp counselor up at LGYC (Lake Geneva Youth Camp) for a couple of weeks. My first year as a counselor. I remember all the people who told me I was crazy for being excited about it, but I couldn't help it. I had wanted to counsel for three years, and last year, I was finally old enough.

I went completely prepared - or so I'd thought. I had attended the training sessions and learned how to control practically any emergency that could possibly occur - from a missing camper to a tornado sand storm. I went, prepared for the physical exhausted I would undoubtedly experience from being in charge of between 8 and 12 middle school aged girls.

What I was totally unprepared for was the enormous emotional toll counseling takes, especially when you had girls like mine. In the two weeks I counseled at LGYC, I visited the camp nurse seventeen times. Various injuries included sprained fingers, swallowed bug spray and a girl who banged her head on the metal soccer goal post. Two experienced homesickness for at least the first couple nights. One of my girls got a letter from her parents, which said that she and her family would be moving to Switzerland at the end of the year. Another's best friend died in a car accident only a few months before she came to camp. And one of my girls were in foster care.

Her social worker paid for her and her sisters to come to camp, to get them out of the way for a while. In just the past couple of years, her home had burned to the ground, her dad had died, and she and her sisters had been out into separate foster homes. Her mother, while still alive, never came to see her or tell her why she was in foster care in the first place. This girl was 9 years old.

I wish I could tell you her name. I wish I could tell you because she inspired me, with her attitude and outlook on life. That little girl was one of the strongest people I had ever met in my life. I pray for her all the time, and I hope that we might see each other again one day. She's had a harder life than anyone else I know, and she deserves everything she's never had.

Being a camp counselor was one of the best experiences of my life. I will never regret meeting this beautiful, strong, amazing girls. And I'm SO going back this year.