I have tons of stories, thoughts and photos/videos from my tiny stint at summer camp, but here’s the #1 main takeaway, which is a MESSAGE TO CURRENT AND UPCOMING NOMETNES VECAKI:
The camp directors are absolutely incredible people who are working suuuper hard to do everything in their power to make sure your kids have a good experience, and they’re doing an amazing job at it.
BUT, they cannot do it alone. YOUR HELP IS NEEDED. This isn’t a for-profit camp; it’s a community service, and it needs community input to function as intended. There were a handful of parents working at nometne in kitchen/teacher/admin functions, and they were awesome! But I’m specifically talking about COUNSELORS.
Here is the current counselor situation:
In a perfect world, all counselors would have:
1. Fluent Latvian language skills
2. Experience with children
3. Experience at nometne
There is a veeery small number (I’d say double-digits?) of people out there in the entire world who have all 3 of these things. Know who most of them are? PARENTS.
In my time as both a camper and a counselor, the counselor staff was always made up of roughly 50% parents, 50% college-age adults, and a select smattering of other randos (like me this year, or teachers/ grad student with summer off). This combo works great because the young counselors can learn about childcare from the parents (especially in the youngest groups) while the younger counselors have the recent nometne memories and the energy/enthusiasm to lead activities when the parents are too fried from, you know, being parents.
This week we only had ONE parent on the counseling staff. ONE. We only had four college-aged kids (three who had been nometnieki) who were all 17 year olds in their first year as vaditaji and were generally awesome, but could have benefitted from being paired with older and/or more experienced people. I’m not sure where all the other college-aged folks were (I’m guessing combo of Dziesmu Svetki and internships). That’s only 5 counselors (6 including me, the rando), so who does that leave?
With the language requirement, it means bringing in mostly-strangers from Latvia. This means rolling the dice. Even if/when these recruits are awesome (which some of them certainly were), they still would benefit from being paired with someone with nometne experience to ease into the culture. And in the worst-case scenario, they are just not a good fit, and maybe even have to leave.
There’s also just the issue of numbers. We only had enough counselors to staff 5 cabins this year. This resulted in much larger groups than ideal, which drew lines between cabins in unusual spots that pushed together wider age groups than usual, and cut across friend groups. Larger groups are also harder to supervise even under the best circumstances with the best counselors, and even harder with inexperienced counselors (have you read Lord of the Flies?). The more counselors we have, the easier the job is for those who do show up, and more energy can be focused on the happiness and safety of each individual child (ie YOUR child).
BOTTOM LINE: If you want your child to have a good experience at nometne, PLEASE sign up to be a counselor. If each family can scrounge together 1 week of PTO for 1 parent, your kids will all have a fantastic time! Or chip in with trying to recruit reliable friends/family with whom you would trust your child’s safety so that we do not have to rely heavily on total strangers.
I’m happy to privately discuss the details of any of this with anybody who is interested (especially parents). Just shoot me a DM.
Helga without the H 