Camden Summer: Part 1

Hey friends,

In the past I’ve enjoyed reading travel blogs, from friends in Ghana, the Netherlands, Uganda, and India, among other places. I want to do the same thing. Its a good way to both process the experience and to keep people updated about how things are going. But I don’t necessarily want to start a whole new blog, so I’m just going to write on here.

With that, here’s part one. I’ve been in Camden, NJ, for almost two weeks now. For you all you West Coast peeps (which is almost everyone), Camden is the city across the river from Philadelphia. It’s been a pretty important place historically – the poet Walt Whitman lived here, Campbell’s Soup started here, the first record player, radio, TV, and drive-in movie theater were all created here. But like a lot of cities in the Northeast, in what’s come to be called “the Rust Belt”, Camden’s experienced a serious decline in the last 50 years and is now one of the poorest cities in the country. Among the things that contributed to this were a highway being built that cut the city in half, factory relocation that eliminated about half of the jobs in the city, block busting by real estate agents, red-lining by banks, “white flight”, and racial discrimination in the GI Bill.

This summer I’m working with Urban Promise, a Christian organization that’s been ministering in Camden for the last 20 years. Urban Promise runs after-school programs throughout the school year for elementary and middle-school kids. During the summer it puts on day camps. For high schoolers, Urban Promise has a “Street Leaders” program that basically hires high schoolers from Camden to help run the programs for the younger kids.  Which is cool because its empowering people from the area rather than always just bringing in people from the outside. But UP does need extra help with running the summer camps, so enter myself and the other 49 summer interns, mostly college students from around the country. I’m working at Camp Faith, the camp for 1st through 4th graders, at the main Urban Promise building in East Camden. Our sister camp, Camp Spirit, is for junior high kids and is across the street. There are six other camps at three other locations around the city; one for South Camden, another for North Camden, and one fairly close to us in the Northeast.