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The camp is over for this year. 6 weeks of work is over. 6 weeks of spending time in the cemetery. It's Saturday and yesterday was my last day at work. 32 kids at the age 13-17 have got their experience.

So for the last 6 weeks I've lived on the following time-table:
7.30 - wake up, breakfast, shower
8.40 - leaving the house
8.52 - arriving at the gate of the cemetery, saying "hi" to the kids
9.00 - handing out tools kids needed to do their job
9.10-11.30 - checking if kids are working, talking with them, reading a book, sometimes helping them
11.50 - leaving the cemetery 1 hour before the actual work time was over

At some days all the times were one hour earlier as we sometimes started the work at 8 to get home even sooner.

There were 3 shifts in the camp, each one of them lasting for two weeks. One shift meant about having 30-40 kids who were divided into 3-4 teams. My job as a supervisor was to lead and check the work of 10 kids. Usually my team consisted of the younger kids and my team's job was to do some basic jobs at the cemetery like sweeping the roads, taking care of the graves no-one takes care of and during the last shift we painted the fences of the old German graves.

I guess going to this camp is the only option for many kids in town to earn some money and work. Estonian laws aren't really great when it comes to under-aged working time and works as well. There are lots of things that aren't allowed by law and also the work time is only 4 hours a day with 10 minutes breaks after every hour for the ones under 17 so many companies aren't interested in employing kids for help for summer time. It's not much that the kids earned at the camp but it's definitely better than nothing.

I joined the team of supervisors/youth workers/educators few days before the camp started so it took me a little while to get every information I needed to do my job. Though to be honest, you need a license to work at the camp but there was impossible to get me the license and they desperately needed someone to look after the kids, so they said we'll handle it somehow. And we did.

Despite the fact that I have never studied how to work with the kids I became the most successful supervisor of four of us. The star-supervisor. That was actually surprising for me as I didn't think I could really fit for that job. Seems kids learned a lot from me and after small encouraging they were very interested in asking questions about university things for example as they didn't know anyone else to ask but then again they were very interested in all that. Like I've heard from feedback kids liked that I was strict (every kid in the whole camp knew my very famous "No!" that never needed any explanation) but at the same time I allowed them to have fun and talked to them like they were my friends and took them as adults not babies.

At the end of every shift there was the best team chosen and two times out of three my team was chosen the best. Becoming the best team meant working excellently, taking part of after-work sports events, making a team flag and doing a little performance about their time in the camp. The best team got the last Friday of the shift off (but they still got paid for that day) and they were sent to visit Kakerdaja bog which was a lot of a fun!

Even though during the last week of the camp I was very tired of all of the camp thing, I now feel like there will be something missing next week. All my teams were so different but I definitely miss my second team the most. I don't know why but this team became very dear to me. I guess thanks to that one day we had at work where we didn't do much of the raking we had to and spent a lot of time talking about education, traveling and life in general. But in the end everything was raked for the end of the day and all the stories were told as well I guess this team learned more with this one hour we spent talking than the others with two weeks.

So now I'll have about two weeks to spend at home, hang out with my friends and relax. On 1st August I'll move into my flat in Jyväskylä (and I have no idea how this flat looks like) and on 4th August I'll fly to Italy with my family to enjoy our holiday until 15th August and on 17th I'm driving back to Jyväskylä and right now I have no idea when I'll visit home again.