Camran's Sister

The Indiana Writers Center’s annual summer program, "Building a Rainbow," is in full swing. I love driving down to St. Florian’s Youth Development Camp on Monday and Wednesday mornings, knowing I’m about to spend a couple of hours with a bunch of extraordinary kids—not to mention the firefighters who founded the summer camp and spend a whole lot of their off-time planning, fundraising and then actually being with the kids all day every day for six weeks.

I especially love sitting down with a kid who seems to be struggling for words and talking with him, asking him questions until something magic happens and, suddenly ,there's a torrent of them and he can’t write fast enough to get them down. This happened one day last week with a kind, thoughtful boy named Camran. He’s new to the camp this year (some attend from the time they’re six until they graduate from high school) and was feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all. He couldn’t think of anything interesting to write, he told me, because he didn’t have an interesting life. After a few questions, he revealed that he’d lived with his sister in fifteen different houses since he was a baby.

“That sounds pretty darn interesting to me,” I said. “And your sister sounds amazing. Tell me about her.”

His face lit up in a huge smile and there came that torrent of words. Here they are.

My sister, Crystal, was always there for me. She chose to take care of me. She didn’t have to take care of me. She dropped out of college to take care of me. She made sure we had somewhere to stay every night. She made sure I ate before she ate. We lived in a couple different houses. We stayed with Andrea, who had a daughter. We played with her all the time. She made the kids happy. We stayed with a girl named Neisha. She had a big TV. She bought me a turtle. I named him Johnny Rico. Mama Buder let us stay with her a little bit. Then we moved to Mama JB’s when I was in kindergarten and we stayed there till I was seven. Mama JB had a daughter who had kids and the kids would always play with us. We played with their dogs, Bruce and Princess, too. Then my sister got a job at the police department. We got our own apartment. She also works part time at Warren High School and at the fireworks store in the summer. She is taking classes at college now.

My sister has black hair down to her shoulders. Her favorite shoes are Jordans. She likes to go hat shopping for baseball hats and other hats that look really cool. She likes jerseys, too. But she doesn’t get them for her, she gets them for me. My sister has a kind heart.

Well. That made my day.

And all over the room the same kind of thing was happening.  The success of our program is directly related to the number of instructors, interns and volunteers available to sit down one-on-one with kids and coax out their stories. Our interns are college students, many of whom are education majors who will soon have their own classrooms. One of our requirements for them is that they write the prompts we ask the kids to write and share them with the group.

Writing teachers should write what they ask their students to write, we believe. For the joy of it, but also to remember how intimidating the blank page can be.

The interns learn as much as the kids do—about teaching and life. As one intern so eloquently put it at the end of last year’s program:

"These children with their bold, simple statements, wild imaginations, and truthful declarations are truly inspiring creatures. Through their honest eyes and even more honest words I became inspired to be a better writer, a better educator, a better person. I allowed their fun personalities to affect my life for the better. I laughed along with them at their comic stories; my heart wept for them with each tear they cried while writing a meaningful piece; I read their words, full of desire to know more, to know every detail possible. I learned being sad and admitting to it is okay and I learned being happy five minutes later is a matter of pure strength. I now understand writing is better when laughing and joking and that no matter how loud or quiet the room, a child’s written voice will always be voluminous.”

 We are all writers, we tell the kids. We’re a community of writers. Writers need each other.

Which is true. I know I need them. Nothing makes me feel more right in the world than working with young writers who are just learning that they have stories to tell and discovering the power of words in the telling.

And by the way, our program still isn’t fully funded. If you’d like to help us meet the cost of this important work with young people, click here. We’d really appreciate it.