The story of our dream come true
In April, we set out to give 60 Ukrainian displaced kids an amazing summer camp experience in Romania, and for the following four months, we have been working very hard to make it come true.
It’s now been a month since we said goodbye to our second group of kids, and the camp is starting to feel like a crazy beautiful dream, rather than the reality we lived through.
While the memories are still fresh, we wanted to share with you what we got right, what felt most rewarding, and what surprised us during the camp.
We are ready to do it again next year. If you want to support us, you can learn how here.
Learning by doing
Somehow, along the way, 60 kids became 80 — ‘a scope creep’ we should probably blame on our professional distortion. It was hard to imagine how it would feel being on the ground, surrounded by and responsible for
40 children each week. And just to remind you, our daily jobs do NOT involve working with children. We are two data scientists who before the camp didn’t really know what an 8-year-old looks like. Given our experience working with children was limited, we were surprised at how good our intuition in picking activities and putting the schedule together was.
We wanted our summer camp to spark curiosity about the world, let kids express themselves through art and movement, and be full of shared moments of joy. And it feels like we got the balance right — the kids loved science and crafts workshops and enjoyed a lot of sports and playtime that allowed them to get to know each other and form deep bonds.
Having the right people on the ground was key to success — we had people with very different areas of expertise, complimenting each other really well and working together as a team. Our kind and caring volunteers brought so much energy to the table and made the experience a joy for kids and for us, the adults.
Even though we did our research before designing the schedule, there were many things we could only learn by doing. The right size of the groups, the right length of the workshops, what time is better for intellectual and physical activities, how kids’ attention span differs when they are indoors and outdoors — all of that and much more we had to learn by trial and error.
To make sure we stayed on our toes, we worked in a truly agile manner (another thing we should blame on our professional distortion). Every night after ten o’clock, when the kids were in bed, all the volunteers gathered in the command room aka the dining hall for debriefing. We would discuss what went well and what needed our attention, share the highlights of the day and the latest gossip, and schedule the day ahead.
These were some of our most favourite moments of the day.
When you give them, they give you
There are no words for when you see a whole group of kids go quiet and wide-eyed in fascination with the workshop. We saw it happen in crafts, robotics, maths, and physics, and every time it was a revelation, a true experience of happiness — a “this is why we’re doing it” feeling.
We tried to make activities as diverse as possible so that every child could find something that spoke to them. STEM, theatre, music, storytelling, crafts and arts, yoga, basketball, volleyball and football, board games — we had it all.
Children’s education was terribly disrupted first by the pandemic and then by the war, so in the last year and a half, most Ukrainian kids didn’t have proper continuous in-person schooling. We had to try really hard to get their attention, but once they were in the flow, they were unstoppable — deeply engrossed in colouring patterns or programming puzzles.
To make sure a major source of distraction wasn’t getting in the way, we had a strict no-phones policy that allowed kids to use their phones only for half an hour in the evening to connect with their parents. We expected most of the children to use this time to mindlessly scroll through TikTok, and were surprised to see that 15 minutes into their phone time, most of them would put their phones away and go play with other children.
Their need to connect with each other was palpable — especially for older kids who were entering their pre-teen years and found themselves in a completely new language and cultural environment, sometimes in small towns, where they were mostly isolated and deprived of possibilities to connect with Ukrainian peers. It was heartwarming and rewarding to see how they made friends and grew closer during the camp.
And as the children got used to us and we grew on them during the week, they started expressing their feelings. We weren’t there for the hugs, but nothing quite compares to being spontaneously hugged by a child. “I don’t want to leave” was the highest praise we heard from them, and we didn’t want to leave either.
But it wasn’t always easy. In our next post, we will share with you what was discouraging and hard, and how we managed to get through the difficulties and find ourselves on the bright side.
