Photograph by Paul Myers
Priscilla Park (left) of Los Gatos High School helps Adeeti Ullal of Saratoga High School prepare her lunch at the Camp Anytown, U.S.A., conference. Before students ate lunch, camp counselors blindfolded some and tied the hands of others, so they could develop empathy for people with disabilities.
Camp Anytown opens eyes to how others see the world
By Rebecca Ray
At Camp Harmon near Boulder Creek, students from Los Gatos and Saratoga High schools saw bathrooms marked "whites only" and "colored only." Camp counselors told students they could only associate with people in their own ethnic and cultural groups.
The students experienced segregation as part of a simulation at Camp Anytown, U.S.A., a leadership conference run by the National Conference for Community and Justice. The NCCJ is a nonprofit organization that promotes understanding and respect among races, religions and cultures. Camp organizers asked students to participate in the exercise in the hope that it would reinforce what they had learned at the conference about overcoming racial and ethnic barriers and accepting others.
The NCCJ, which holds about 250 Camp Anytown conferences around the country each year, held a conference for Los Gatos and Saratoga High schools at Camp Harmon from Feb. 13 through 16. School officials invited about 100 students from the two schools, who came from diverse ethnic, religious and family backgrounds, and who demonstrated leadership potential.
The idea behind Camp Anytown is that students become better leaders by developing more self-confidence and self-awareness, while gaining more appreciation for each others' differences.
"You have to see it to believe it, but it really does change you, and it changes other people," said Katalyn Ford, a 17-year-old junior at Los Gatos High School.
Nayla Raad, another LGHS junior, said she learned how people can hurt each other without knowing it.
During one exercise, students discussed stereotypes associated with various ethnic and cultural groups, and members of the groups discussed how the stereotypes made them feel.
Students also engaged in a gender empowerment exercise, which was designed to improve understanding between genders. First, students listed messages they would give their children about the other gender. While boys said they would tell their sons that girls were both prudish and promiscuous, girls said they would tell their daughters that boys couldn't be trusted. Members of both groups were offended by the other group's descriptions of them when they had described the other gender negatively, said Kathryn Nakaji, a 15-year-old freshman at Saratoga High School.
During the second part of the exercise, a leader read statements, and participants stood if the statements applied to them. "It was just really incredible to see the number of guys who stood up and said they had been hit for crying," Ford said.
Similarly, Jeff Kendall-Weed, a 16-year-old junior from Los Gatos High School, said he was struck by how many girls said they had been assaulted. "[Camp Anytown] awakened me to a lot of situations that I don't think about, a lot of problems that I never considered before," he said.
During another exercise, students split into culture groups and performed skits for the rest of the camp. Through the skits, they shared their groups' contributions, customs, traditions and immigration histories, as well as stereotypes about their groups that they wanted to diffuse.
Students engaged in another exercise to develop empathy for people with disabilities. Before lunch, camp leaders blindfolded some of the students and tied the remaining students' hands.
While some participants had both hands tied together, most of them only had one hand tied to their sides. Students had to function with their disabilities while eating half their lunch. While students with one hand found themselves helping the other students, the students being helped experienced the frustration of having to depend on others.
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