Darlene is a technical wizard. Her skills come in handy all over camp, whether she’s teaching guitar, making sure our projector is working, or adjusting instruments for campers on stage. (Darlene also secretly has amazing pipes, which she occasionally will share with us via a spot-on version of Amy Winehouse at karaoke!) This is the second summer she’s shared her magic as a volunteer at camp.
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The way I grew up listening to music was actually through church. I started playing piano with a deaconess, which is one of the leaders in Seventh Day Adventist church. And I really like singing the hymns. I guess it definitely does influence how I like to play. A lot of times, a brother or sister would play on their guitar or just on their piano and it would just be them. Now it’s usually just me and my guitar and that’s it.
Last year I [volunteered] for the first time. Obviously, I came back for seconds. I definitely felt more confident coming into it. Knowing what to do and when to be hands on and when to be hands off – that’s usually a tricky balance. Because you want to let them do their own thing, but you also want to be there as support. You don’t want to just throw them in the pool and say swim.
I’ve never considered myself someone good with kids. I’m an only child, and I was always the youngest out of all my cousins, so sharing or those concepts of being around other kids was never a thing. I think that was the challenge in the beginning – I didn’t know how to talk to them.
It turned out to just be all in my head. These kids are like, built with microchips nowadays, because they’re so smart and so eloquent and so expressive.
You don’t want to disappoint the kids because they’re the ones working hardest. I just want to make sure that at the end of the day I did the best I could for them.
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Darlene’s story is part of a weekly series called ON THE MIC that shares voices and faces from camp this summer. The stories are produced by Alex Braunstein of One Little Did.
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