Personal Narrative: How Camp Barnabas Changed My Life

991 Words2 Pages

After making the difficult decision of moving out from a school I called home and attended since Kindergarten, my freshman year in a new environment made for a rocky start. I fell into the wrong crowd, tried getting out, but kept making bad decisions, which eventually led to a deep depression. My dreams I had as a child were fading before my eyes, and negative thoughts consumed my mind. I started to believe that I had no purpose and could never amount to anything, but the four days at Camp Barnabas in Missouri changed the course of my entire life. This experience was important to me and helped sculpt me into the person I am today. Camp Barnabas is a program that enables children with mental disabilities to enjoy camping activities that they would not have the chance to …show more content…

Both the volunteers and children were timid, but because of my natural imagination and easy-going nature with the children, I started telling silly stories they spent minutes laughing over and then watched them stretch their faces in front of my camera. I learned that I had a natural ability to start a movement, connect two different groups of people, and create bonds between them. Again, I was also shown with this ability when a fight emerged from my other group of younger volunteers. Many of them were angry at our group leader, all declaring to act out in some form of rebellion as revenge. Although I was angry at her myself, I respected my leader and refused to take a part of it. Instead of arguing, I talked to them and explained our leader’s possible situation. I have always had the ability to understand another person’s point of view, so I explained to them that taking care of twenty young teenagers is challenging and knowing each of our individual situations was difficult. Instead, I proposed we talk about our problems with our leader peacefully, which was what we ended up doing and created a tighter, stronger bond in our

Open Document