Ethan Schwartz Blog - What is Camp Ramah?: Part 3

The focus of Ramah is always the development of the self, and much happens simply on the level of the individual camper. However, the camp exists in community, with a communal nature so fundamental that it escapes campers' consciousness. Many of them will only notice it on that first night after returning home, when, tossing in their beds, their ears ring with the silence of rooms that are solely their own. At Ramah, campers are put in the rare situation of living with other people in every moment. This begins in the cabin, where campers experience the fun and challenges of sharing a space with ten to twelve other individuals for eight weeks. For many children, the cabin setting is the first in which they must truly consider the experience of others. A camper cannot simply behave in any way that suits him; he must pause and think about how his actions will affect his friends, as well as about what he himself needs and expects from them. In the cabin, campers gain greater awareness of self by considering their commitments, expectations, and boundaries as a valued part of a working whole.

The essential skills that this experience transmits are profoundly visible. Ramah campers outshine their peers in group situations; they are the voice of reason in a heated argument and the team player on the court; they will one day be the diplomats of their college dormitories. All of this is possible because the camper has the ability to see himself as an integral part of a group, neither putting himself before it nor letting it sweep him away. Ramah campers know how to work with other people.

Community reaches its next level with the aidah, each of which typically consists of about seventy boys and girls of the same grade. Outside of the cabin, coeducation is among the most evident and defining elements of the Ramah community; spending all one's time with others includes spending a great deal of one's time with the opposite sex. There can be no denying the tension that this initially causes. Campers enter Ramah at the height of their self-imposed gender segregation-at an age when the opposite sex is not merely a confusing world but a distant, irrelevant one. One needs merely to look at the younger aidot to see the physical line that campers draw between the genders: in group activities, campers tend to organize themselves tellingly with girls on one side and boys on the other.

Every structured activity at Ramah is a conscious effort to dissipate this line. Like the daily schedule, coeducation is about facilitation. Males and females aren't forced to artificially interact; in fact, the structure brings them together in a situation where the focus is on anything but each other-whether it be a goal for which they have to work or an activity that they want to do. Without even being aware of it, campers work together and talk a great deal with the people from whom they normally scurry away. In an interesting reversal on the typical trope of informal education, campers sense the structure while the freedom goes unnoticed. Ramah sets boys and girls free to interact with each other in a context that makes them open to doing so.

The dissipation of the gender line happens with remarkable speed: even in their earliest summers, Ramah campers make bounding progress in overcoming the stifling pressure that adolescents typically experience amidst their opposite-gendered peers. By creating an environment in which campers move quickly past the stages of distance and objectification, Ramah's coeducation helps campers learn that the opposite sex offers just as much opportunity for friendship as their own. A high level of comfort with the opposite sex is one of the most important and evident skills that Ramah campers take away from their camp experience. It will help them avoid unhealthy behavior in high school by guiding them to balanced, coed social dynamics that, like camp, allow them to be who they are. And it will continue to help them as they begin to form serious romantic attachments, for they will understand that friendship is the basis of all relationships.

At Camp Ramah, boys and girls are friends; not only can they be themselves with each other, but they can learn about themselves from each other.

For all the importance of the cabin and the aidah, however, community at Ramah transcends mere groupings. It's about the contact between individuals. If Ramah is willing to sit and listen to accusations of amateurism in its activities, then it deserves to demand recognition for the brilliance with which it encourages social interaction. Every level of Ramah's organization reflects its effort to make people see and bump into one another. Go inside a cabin and you will see bunk beds meticulously laid out, usually in circles or U-shapes, as to avoid division and give every camper easy access to each of his cabinmates. This arrangement is mimicked come mealtime, when campers sit by cabin and share family-style meals. With no traffic-no coming and going, no standing up and sitting down-campers are guaranteed three times daily during which they are, if nothing else, constantly looking at their friends face to face; eating becomes a curiously intimate part of the day. Widening your focus, you will notice that Ramah cabins are never solitary but arranged in clusters, ensuring that the closeness of the cabin unit does not go so far as to become a limitation. Campers need only wander a few feet from their porch to find fresh faces and new friends.

Finally, expanding your lens to consider the camp as a whole, you will find that Ramah is one great inward-facing circle in which people cannot help but interact with and relate to each other. At the heart of camp sits the Kikar-a rolling expanse of thick green grass that beckons people to lounge and converse. Take a seat in this place, the very image of Camp Ramah, and you will find that no matter who is at your side, you are sitting with the entire camp; each spot on the Kikar offers a vantage of every other. Its role as the camp's major thoroughfare will always defer to its social one, as people strolling across it inevitably congregate to spend time together. Before long, casual conversations or walks to the mailroom become lively gatherings of friends, counselors, and even people who have not yet met.

All across Camp Ramah, from the bustling Kikar to the peaceful woods, the cabin porches to the dining hall-in any place where campers are spending time together-their communication is inevitably meaningful because it is always personal. Ramah offers no way to speak with a person that does not involve looking at his or her face; cell phones, email, and instant messaging disappear. How does our technology-bloated generation accept this adjustment? With relief. People unfamiliar with Ramah imagine it as two months spent starving for "civilization," when, in reality, it is the answer to starvation-the starvation for wholeness which civilization has accepted as the norm. To get hold of a person, you really have to get hold of all of him or her-and give all of yourself in return. Connections can be neither flimsy nor fake, for they are founded only in each individual's true, uninhibited self. Ramah campers find best friends in people with whom they would not speak had they met at home; they make connections with individuals, not social groups or images or talents. Authenticity is the social language of Ramah.

Because of these relationships, the camper who has been at Ramah for even just a single summer will find that returning to camp offers not only the openness and possibility with which it first greeted her, but something more: a community that knows her-that will help her grow while keeping her grounded in who she is. Familiarity will never inhibit possibility; the camper is just as free to continue developing her sense of self, but with the advantage of having behind her a community that is even more prepared to help her do so. The Ramah camper returns to this every summer during one of life's most important developmental phases. The span of ages ten to sixteen-marked particularly by the transition from childhood to adolescence and from middle school to high school-is a whirlwind of change and upheaval in which it is all too easy to lose touch with oneself. But every summer throughout this period, Ramahniks can count on retreating into their change of pace in a change of place-into a community that knows them, encouraging growth while combating adolescent tumult. Ramah campers grow up together and grow through each other. Personal and social development are united; friendship becomes love.

Why do kids come to Camp Ramah? To be themselves-which is fun. Campers come to Ramah to have fun being themselves with friends who are also just being themselves.