Down the Memory Lane

When I was in high school, I got into this summer program for underprivileged kids. We’d work 4 days in a children’s camp near Floyd Bennet Field, and then for 1 day we’d spend a day in a training center.

The job was somewhat easy – a couple of hours cleaning and then helping camp counselors with activities. I mostly helped with fishing – casting the rods and baiting the hooks and such (I was the only one in the lot of us who had that skill). One kid even caught a fluke once. But everyone involved got a nice tan and a lot of fresh air.

The training part was a bit demeaning though. I remember how they staged a little game show where if you answered a question right, you got a condom. White for 1 point, red for 3 points and black for 5 points. Many of my co-workers already had children, so the idea was valid. But geeks like me usually don’t get to have sex in high school, so that was a bit demeaning. I am not even talking about the fact that the instructor chuckled when he assigned color values to the “prizes”.