Meet Emma Ehrlich! She is an eighteen year old freshman, Discovery major with an interest in environmental studies, biology, community service, and global awareness. During the summers she is a camp counselor at Summer Festival of the Arts (SFOA) located in Bar Harbor, Maine on Mount Desert Island. Mount Desert Island is such a beautiful location and is a tourist destination that is home to Acadia National Park, an incredible natural beauty. The camp takes place in the local high school, in different classrooms, and the kids participate in arts and crafts of all kinds- singing, dancing, painting, drawing, writing, instruments, yoga.
She taught yoga, dance, and hand-made crafts, like linoleum carving, printmaking, and paper-mache. The kids are generally well-behaved, enjoyable, and a lot smarter than you’d think, but there are trouble makers who disrupt class and need to be scolded. The heads of the camp, Frank and Carlene, deal with those kids. Her favorite thing is going back each year and seeing how all the campers and staff have grown and how the entire camp is a celebration of art.
Unfortunately, the other camp in Bar Harbor that she has also worked at, Camp Beech Cliff, recently received a 10 million dollar donation, so all of its facilities and programs have improved so much that they have implemented a great art program so SFOA is losing attendance and money. All her friends work at camp too and were all campers there before they were counselors; she has been there for five years, but most of her friends have attended longer (camper for two years, apprentice for one year, and counselor for two years). An apprentice is a mixture of a counselor and a camper- take some classes, teach some classes. She says, “It’s helped me become a more patient and understanding person because you never know where the kids are coming from or what their home life is like, but it’s your job to make sure they have a good time while they’re at camp and not judge their behavior based on your knowledge.”