My Turning Point: Repairing Homes for the Needy

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Recommended: An essay on life lessons

I have always perceived my life as a movie, with a plot and predetermined events and players, flowing fluidly from scene to scene and day to day aided by an ever-playing soundtrack of all the songs and pieced-together melodies I listen to, hum, or sing and all the words I speak and hear. When I arrive at wherever we’re all going when we leave earth, I’ve always thought I and all of my supporting characters could watch a slideshow of pictures and video clips of every second of my existence, like a PowerPoint of my own evolutionary story. If that’s all true, when I watch the playback of my young life, the audience will undoubtedly be on the edge of their seats (and if they’re like my mother, in tears) for the life-altering segment that was the first full week of last July. I spent this week in Frostburg, a small town in Western Maryland, near the border of West Virginia. If you’ve never been there, let me tell you; there’s not much to do. But I went to this almost-forgotten little place surrounded by rolling hunter-green hills for a reason that touched me in a deeply unforgettable way.

As I mentioned before, there’s not really much in Frostburg, Maryland, besides Frostburg College. The quiet, recession-changed streets of the tiny town are lined with family-owned restaurants (many boarded up), beautiful but ancient houses, a couple of sad-looking funeral homes, an empty movie theater, and countless stained-glass-windowed old brick churches. It’s surrounded by a collection of other church-filled towns and winding mountain-side roads lined with run-down homes. But what takes place for four weeks every summer on the college campus is something truly amazing, something that changed my life and affected the lives of many others: Camp Hop...

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...n my personal odyssey, Camp Hope was vital in my development as a person because it made me feel as if I could really do something right. Making such a big change in the lives of the people whose house we worked on was both fun and satisfying. It was greatly beneficial for me to feel so cared for by the leaders and the other teens while I was there. Like the lead character in any movie, I have evolved and learned on a number of occasions, but Camp Hope 2009 was definitely the one most important to me. I am such a changed person that it is like I am in a new movie with a different plot and even a different star. I look forward to next July, when I can spend another week fixing up houses and repairing myself as a person. With next year’s Camp Hope as the climax, this new life of mine is one sequel that will definitely be just as good, if not better, than the original.

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