No, really. My job now involves talking to strangers all the time, putting my name in print and in general being outgoing in the annoying way only journalists have license to do.
But if you met me at five or 10 or even 15 years old, you wouldn’t have pegged me for a future reporter.When I was younger, I spent a week several years in a row at a local summer camp on a small lake less than an hour away from home. I learned to canoe, faced my fear of heights on the climbing wall and did arts and crafts. I learned to love the sound of rain on a tin roof at night and the comforting warmth of a sleeping bag in a dark cabin.
Teenage me returned to the same camp as a counsellor for several summers, learning to belay children up that climbing wall, teaching them the same songs I had known by heart for years and leading canoe trips across the lake. Later I was a board member and then the camp director. And while my early years as a camper were certainly a gift, being able to give that gift to other children was an even more valuable and formative experience for me. It was then that I really came out of my shell.
Every week, I saw with my own eyes the closest thing to a miracle I’ve ever witnessed. The kids who showed up on Monday too shy to speak up at the dinner table were the ones singing the loudest at the final campfire and giving the biggest hugs before they left. They were often the kids who, I would learn, were coming from the hardest places, places of poverty or family unrest.
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