Summer Home for the Handicapped

by Joe Hirsch

Pay a quick visit to Camp HASC, and you’d probably conclude that it resembles every other sleep-away camp in the mountains.  The well-kept grounds and neat rows of bunkhouses seem standard enough.  The dining room, with its wide interior and stucco siding, could easily pass for another camp’s rec center.  And the indoor pool, tucked away at the edge of campus, measures six feet, just like other pools of its kind.

Take a closer look, though, and you’ll begin to notice small differences.  How the bunkhouses come equipped with extra-large showers and bathrooms to accommodate the wheelchairs.  The stock of special-diet products, coordinated by a team of nutritionists, that fills the dining room.  The changing table and underwater ramp that sit poolside.

Stay for a while, and it won’t take long to realize that HASC bears an otherworldly quality beneath its plain façade.  Those first moments spent in camp strike hardest.  There is a sense of total displacement, of being removed from reality and thrown into a strange and unfamiliar setting that is by turns shocking and saddening.  Campers whiz by in motorized wheelchairs.  Others, so frail that they could have left a concentration camp, hobble along with protective helmets.  There are campers who cannot walk, campers who cannot speak, and campers for whom the only means of feeding is a G-tube that extends from the midsection of their bodies.  Here, the human condition is captured in its most vulnerable state.  Cerebral palsy.  Down syndrome.  Autism. Profound mental retardation.  New words, like seizure, topical and Latex enter the daily vernacular.  The camp infirmary, with its impressive supply of narcotics and other prescription drugs, might as well be called SmithKline Beecham.          

But once you settle into this new, if bewildering reality, the images of suffering turn to portraits of bliss; the incoherent moans of a non-verbal camper bring forth peals of laughter; the distorted face of a Down’s child appears beautiful.  The emotional pain disappears as quickly as it first arrived, pushed away by feelings of optimism, determination, and hope.  Limitations become opportunities, and for the campers of HASC, the battle to overcome adversity is nothing short of heroic.  Despite their physical deficiencies, they somehow manage to inspire virtue in those around them.  They are true to their word, honest to a fault, and speak only the purest of thoughts.   

They become, in just a matter of weeks, the icons of society – celebrated and idolized by higher-functioning and able-bodied adults, who, in any other setting, might not even pay them so much as a glance.  Where else in the world could this disabled and often overlooked population reach the status of, well, rock stars?  A place where the handicapped have their own theme songs, name chants, and even award ceremonies?  Such a place does not – and cannot – exist outside of HASC.

I joined HASC three summers ago on a campaign of chesed: to devote my time away from yeshiva and college to a meaningful pursuit.  I ended up at HASC somewhat by default, largely because a close friend (and former HASC counselor himself) all but forced me to fill out an application.  But as I would quickly learn, surviving the mental and physical strain of the job demanded more than just my self-congratulatory assurances of chesed work.  Truthfully, chesed was the last thing on my mind as I changed the diaper of my thirty-year-old camper.  And chesed doesn’t provide the motivation needed to overcome periods of exhaustion, frustration, or helplessness, emotions that inevitably creep over every counselor at some point during the summer.

The lure of HASC, I think, is not built around the concept of helping others, but helping oneself.  As full-time caretakers, counselors immediately learn to become more self-sacrificing than ever before.  There are diapers to change, soiled bodies to wash, mouths that need feeding.  A learning chavrusa may have to be postponed, and davenning with a minyan delayed or missed entirely because a camper needs attention.  You begin to think in the plural, wondering, as you button your coat on a cold day, if your camper feels cold, too.  Birthdays in HASC are mini-events, accompanied by colorful signs and balloons and even a personalized birthday song – all arranged and paid for by the counselors themselves.  You watch a counselor painstakingly wipe the messy face of a camper after a meal.  Or attach leg braces.  Or tie shoelaces.  These small acts of selflessness, repeated daily over the course of the summer, change a person.  Society views the disabled with some degree of skepticism, certain that they have nothing to contribute or teach to the rest of us.  HASC proves them all wrong.  In a camp renown for giving, it’s usually the counselors who end up receiving most.

 Joe Hirsch  is a Yeshiva College Junior.