We are Young and Free!!!

I am lying in my hotel bedroom. It is Friday, I have been here for 2 weeks and I am staying for a third. Children are screaming outside as I turn the music louder, trying to drown them out. However, this seems impossible. They are playing a game called Safari where they have to capture and drag a tutor who is some sort of animal to the judges to get points. It gets brutal, it is Friday I am tired, I am happy that at this moment I do not have to be a safari animal and have children drag and pull me across the garden so that they will win another game.

Competition. Italian children. It never fails.

No but I’m lying. I am not tired. Tired means that you need to go to bed and sleep and you will be ok tomorrow. Tired is an emotion that I have long since passed. Now, I am actually swimming in the deep realms of exhaustion. I have not seen my Mary energy in days, I have been walking in what seems like a flutter of dream-like images past children, talking to children, teaching, dancing, singing and functioning on an energy that is not my own but I must have borrowed from another reserve from some other place..

There are 2 types of camps in Italy. At the city camps we work very respectable hours from 9am to 5pm with some short breaks in between and live in host families where we are fed and cared for. We can sleep and they take us on nice exploratory evening adventures. Then there is the other kettle of fish (on a side note: has anyone ever really seen a kettle of fish?) a summer camp. Summer camp assimilates a sort of every-waking-minute commitment. There is no such thing as an evening off and there is no such thing as a weekend. The children arrive at around 9am on Sunday morning and from then we have lessons, arranged activities, lunch, supper, breakfast, night duty (making sure they actually go to sleep) until Saturday afternoon where we plan the next week and go to sleep until the children arrive again on Sunday. All their time is taken up by us and thus, all our time is taken up by them.

In a peaceful life I am a very good sleeper. I lie in bed and think a little, enjoying my thoughts slowly whirling around my head before I settle into the crazy thought mode and fall gently into sleep. But here my mind is full of repetitive songs like “I’m a little teapot”, lesson plans for the following day, the things the children said, how to make thirteen year olds excited, and how I cannot sleep when there are three people in my bedroom. These thoughts whirl and twirl for at least an hour every night and awake at anew exhausted level the following day.

Exhaustion. This is a place I have never idled at for this long.

Oh but it is always interesting, I cannot ever say that I come close to the painful disease of boredom. In fact, it is fun. We had a talent show last night and many children performed. Karate, dances, guitar playing, fake trumpet playing, and synchronized mechanical cars. Fabulous. I remembered all the talent shows I performed on camps as a child. We sang (the Spice Girls, Oh Ddddear), we danced (Tragedy, when the feeling’s gone…), and we did little skits. Anyway, we gave prizes to 3 groups who tied second and a winner. Last time we gave all the performer’s prizes and the winner a big prize. Oh but the disappointed on 2 little girl’s faces (who had in fact done a very good dance) almost broke my heart. I know that feeling, I remember the cold flush of disappointment. As adults we learn that we don’t want to handle disappointment and so we learn not to try unless we know we are very good (or ridiculous enough as the case may be). And it was agonizing as I felt I was teaching children that they must not try because they may not be the winner. Some children at a young age never want to try and some do and the fact that I have a hand in determining their attitude for the future is somewhat harrowing.

Oh silly decisions. One has to be so careful yet at the same time, sometimes one group has to win and someone has to lose. It is competition, the children learn English through competition. It is something I struggle with, that is, letting one child win over another but I still use competition consistently, to make my life easier as a teacher.

Oh but yet again my own education continues. About people, relationships. We are chucked into a camp with people you have never seen before and immediately you have to learn how to work together, who leads, who follows, who prepares, who …. Difficult. For the most part, I love the people I work with. In time, and not all the time. It is frustrating, I am frustrating, they are frustrating. When to work, when to relax, when you are relaxing and others are working. Life. people.

And, I am a person, I am not going to like all the children I teach. Sometimes they are too shy to talk to me and I don’t get much out of them and sometimes there is a child that is simply not my kind of person. For the first day of week one, 2 girls arrived from the South of Italy, they had sent their bags before them full to the brim with clothes for every outfit they may possibly need for the 2 weeks of Summer camp (I have lived out of a bag perhaps a third of the size since November) I surveyed these girls who were going to be in my class for 2 weeks and judged them as perhaps a bit, at least, an effort to entertain. Older children are an effort in general as these camps were not constructed for children 13 and over. By some weird brain function that I have going on my head this is the age I always ask to teach. Trying to make preteens who are too cool for school NOT too cool for school is, well, a challenge. And I judged these girls as such.

So I began every day with a stretching session. Reach for sky, reach for the ground. Honestly this was not for the children, this was for me I always forget to stretch, why not get paid for it? After a few days they learnt there was no point arguing as it was happening anyway and after a few more days when we were playing a general forfeit game they were running around tables 10 times with smiles on their faces, loving volleyball games and being blindfolded as their peers told them directions in English. Weirdly, these 13 year old girls with tons of makeup, fancy clothes and who don’t want to get dirty turned out to both possess fabulous hearts. I am 23 and I should know by now that fancy clothes and make up does not make a certain type of person. I should know that but again I find my perceptions judge first before I allow a pure judgement. Humbled, yet again. Teaching truly has taught me in these funny mountains that the children who at first frustrate me may end up being the ones I love the best.

Yes, exhaustion, learning and fun. The children exhaust us and they don’t sleep but then we get to play water games and drench the children in cold mountain water, there’s tennis day where I tan in the sun while the children get a tennis lesson and lake day when the children play in the lake while I focus on practicing my English (inappropriate jokes, sarcasm and the like) with fellow tutors and continue my tannig layers. Sometimes I walk on my hands and all the children start clapping like I am sort of upside down hero.

“We are young and free!” I shout in my morning routine. “No, Mary we are young but we are NOT frrree…ahhh, my mother…” one of my Southern Italy princesses says by way of explanation. I understand. Freedom is complicated. This is a mad life. An exhausted life. And maybe not a free life. But I am in the mountains in Italy. It is a good life.