Camper Stephen
Camper Stephen was in the fourth grade when he learned that he had cancer. He went through chemotherapy, lost all of his hair, couldn’t go to school and, as he puts it, “just basically felt rotten for an entire year.” He goes on to explain, “I could barely run, could barely play sports, . . . heck, I could barely eat my food half the time. The medicine tasted disgusting and there was a chance that I could die. A small one, granted, but I knew what I was up against. Cancer was, without a doubt, the single worst experience of my life.”
The first time that Stephen went to The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, he was still in treatment. “It was the best week of my life,” he says. “I met kids going through the same hardships I was . . . kids taking the same medicine, bearing the same scares, living the same lives. More importantly, thought, I also met kids that were going through situations that, in my mind, were ten times tougher than my own. Kids that had AIDS, sickle cell anemia, hemophilia . . . diseases that may never be cured. It really made me realize, my gosh, I got off easy.”
Camp became more than a place in Ashford, Connecticut for Stephen. “It’s now a place in my heart,” he explains. “It is a place of refuge. A place I can hide from the rest of the world and forget unhappiness, stress, sickness and death. Nobody there cares what disease you have. No matter who you are, what type of family you’re from, how sick you are, you will find pure, all-encompassing, no-holds-barred love waiting to greet you. Illnesses are left at the gate. While you’re there, anything and everything is possible.
Talk to any camper. You’ll get the same answer. It can’t be described, but there’s a magic to Camp, and it doesn’t rest in Ashford. It’s the magic of belief – the belief that things aren’t as bad as they seem. The belief that you’re the best dancer in the entire dining hall. The belief that you can eat all the Lucky Charms you want and never get sick. The belief that you can beat your counselor in basketball every single time you play him. But most importantly, the belief that you are not sick. The belief that you are normal. That… that’s magic.”
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