Morning Meditation

Since my last leave from the camps at the end of July 2005, I’ve been spending my summers searching for uses for my time. The first summer off I spent at home with some friends. It was a pleasant but indolent experience. Somewhat disillusioned, I, come September 2006, began again looking for a suitable and constructive way to spend my time off from school. I think it was near October when my mother, ever helpful, suggested that I go to the Dominican Republic, with a local organization named Absolute, to do humanitarian work. I agreed. This is but one of the stories that have contributed to a lingering infatuation, that drew me back a second summer, as staff.

Like many who’ve been charmed by the Third World, I fell in love with a child. He was a small Dominican boy, about this height at seven years, with deep, chocolate eyes, and a shy confidence. We had, I suppose one could argue, a rather shallow relationship. Indeed, our communication was limited to what childish fistfights and my broken Spanish could give. He was, yes, quite poor. He lived in an isolated village in the foothills of El Choco, and ran happily around each day in the same pair of tattered, evenly cut corduroy shorts. Behind his playful machismo rested a tender heart, and a gentle disposition.

I saw him again this year about mid July. It was the most profound joy I’ve ever felt: a turbulent torrent of hurried emotions and ghosted words that left me near incapable of even gasping his name – Jenaro.

I’ve thought extensively on Jenaro since that blinding meeting. What was he? Why did he affect me? Does his counterpart exist for everyone? I, of course, in him saw my own youth’s immaturity timelessly reiterated. That my youth’s charms – or what I perceive them to be – we acted flawlessly by an impoverished boy, raised in the shadow of a mountain, bereft of any tangible materialism, only twisted my thoughts further.

I realized, after some time, that with Jenaro I felt not love, in the Western sense, but community: solidarity regardless of the petty “differences” society has erected to please us, and our vanity.

And that, I think, is the Ahmek spirit. Every summer the camps are populated by young people of different nationality, race, religion; who hold different political views, who are gifted with different talents. And yet, summer terminated, those same young people go their ways achingly conscious of the community they’ve helped create, the community they’ve helped maintain.

And we, the alumni who have come back to redraw the pact we signed with the camps in our youths – the pact to foster community despite difference – are a fine personification of this Ahmek spirit, a spirit which, I hope, we can all bring into and create in the world, and make it a collective paradise.

• T R Van Valkenburg