In the summer of 2011, the Institute for the Blind
Francesco Cavazza organized yet another initiative involving teenagers
living with vision loss, but with something a little different from the
past years. As a matter of fact, the 19 young people who participated
and their 5 educators spent two weeks in a guesthouse of the
evocative Gessi Bolognesi park and in the ravines of Abbadessa These were
15 intense days, rich with activities of games and sports (swimming,
baseball, athletics, showdown, daytime and night time excursions),
workshops, of which a good number were organized in collaboration with
workers of the Dulcamara cooperative: the pizza workshop, the wool
workshop, the joiner's workshop, just to name a few.
The summer camp
was aimed at teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18. This is a period of
time where doing things apart from one's own family to meet other people
the same age to share experiences means so much and is so important, as
much as eating or sleeping. The group of peers is crossing the bridge from
childhood to adulthood. And being with friends during the teenage years
can be a driving force for big changes. For these reasons, one of the
organizers' first purposes was actually to foster interactions between
kids the same age. We wanted to propose the teenagers formative as well as
recreational moments to experiment, to challenge themselves in order to
bring out their potential so that they could actively take possession of
their practical and relational skills, present or still hidden. It is in
the day-to-day small gestures that kids had to challenge their own
personal autonomy: make their own bed, get dressed and undressed without
help, keep their stuff and area clean, dress up the table, prepare their
own breakfast, help educators with small tasks in the kitchen, do the
laundry, get around inside and outside the dwelling. These are not
necessarily easy tasks that should be taken for granted; they required
time and patience to be acquired and managed. And two weeks were still not
enough.
A few months have passed and we gathered the comments from a
few of the teenagers, and the word that always comes back in the stories
is "FRIENDS". To create new friendships or consolidate older ones was the
most significant aspect for many of them. Andrea remembers the meals at
the table talking and listening to the others; Federico loved "to hang out
and talk with the others late at night in their rooms"; Lorenzo remembers
the walks he took with his friends in the vicinity of the house, without
adults around; Filmon said that to him "it was important to get together
and help each other to learn to be more independent, learning to trust
each other and not leaving it up only to the adults".
To all of us, including educators, we keep in our heart the music workshop (led by three young Bolognese musicians, Diego Occhiali, Cristian Grassilli and Tommy Ruggero) which concluded with a short evening performance. From this workshop was born a song, written by the teenagers, entitled "The Blue Tsunami", which became the leitmotiv of our vacation. In that fantastic wave, maybe is contained the creative and transforming energy of all these kids, some precious potential that must be and has the right to be expressed and which should continue to
grow.
