wfn.org | Young shooting survivors recover at Ferncliff camp

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Note #7435 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

24-September-2002
02361

Camp courage

Young shooting survivors recover at Ferncliff camp

by David Koon
Arkansas Times
Reprinted with permission

(Editor's note: Ferncliff Camp is a ministry of Arkansas Presbytery of the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) - Jerry L. Van Marter)

LITTLE ROCK, AR - At Ferncliff Camp west of Little Rock, it's one of those
summer nights you wish you could bottle up and put on a shelf for February.

Katydids hum in the trees across the lake. The sky goes a muted blue-gray.
Oaks and pines stand black on the ridge, and the water is a dark mirror
reflecting the cabins on the far shore.

At the edge of the lake, a hundred or so people - full up on barbecue and
pink lemonade - are dancing to the music of a fiddle band, laughing raucously
as a headset-wearing caller leads them through a series of old-timey steps.

It's hard to believe some of them are the same children we have seen in
recent years, weeping in the wake of one school shooting or another.

But then again, that's the whole point.

This marks the seventh incarnation of Connection, a camp originally set up
for the survivors of the 1998 shootings at Westside Middle School in
Jonesboro.

The first four Connection camps, held in the summer and spring of 1998-99,
were strictly for the students of Westside. But since the 1999 shootings at
Columbine High School in Littleton, CO, Connection has reached out to the
victims of other school shootings and further, bringing in children from
Bosnia, from inner-city Los Angeles and St. Louis.

In the crowd tonight are kids from Jonesboro, Littleton, Conyers, GA, Los
Angeles and six from New York City, a nod to 9/11. The camaraderie here goes
far beyond your average meet-and-greet, far beyond even your average family
reunion, where the bonds are as thick as blood.

Behind some of these young smiles are the faces of those who once came upon
the dark iceberg of death, and then watched as it slipped silently by. They
have been seamed at their souls by the experience. 

Connection is the brainchild of the Rev. David Gill, a bespectacled fellow
with the good humor and firm handshake of a preacher. In 1998, less than a
year after taking the job as director of Ferncliff Camp, Gill was chatting
with a coworker in his office when news of the shootings in Jonesboro broke.

Horrified by the scope of the event and the age of the victims, Gill started
trying to find a way to help.

"The tragedy happened on Tuesday," Gill says. "On Friday, it just came to me,
What can we do for those kids? What is it that the camp has to offer? And I
thought, What we do is camp."

What Gill decided to do was to set up a free, week-long retreat for the
survivors, a "healing camp" as he calls it. That first summer, 68 kids showed
up, trucked over from Westside in buses borrowed from a neighboring school
district so news crews wouldn't give chase.

The kids who unloaded at Ferncliff were shell-shocked, bewildered, but still
willing to smile. Gill says that was the key to reaching them.

"Who wants to go to art therapy?" he says. "But a kid might want to do art.
If you can make it fun, you can kind of come in the backdoor with things that
are meaningful to them."

By the end of the week, some parents said the results were nothing short of
amazing.

"I remember one parent saying to us, 'You gave us our kids back,'" Gill says.

Valerie Webb is one of those who says she got her life back at Ferncliff.

She is a pretty young woman with old, old eyes. She and her twin sister were
at Westside Middle School that day, and saw their friends shot down. They've
been coming to Connection since the beginning.

"That first year, the only reason I came was because my friends were coming,"
Valerie says. "We figured it was just going to be another week of people
trying to counsel at us. But they actually listened. They didn't ask us to
talk about what we didn't want to talk about. They respected our feelings.
They didn't say what most people were saying at the time, which was 'I
understand.'"

Valerie credits Connection with nothing less than saving her sanity, her
freedom, and her life.

"I felt like (the shooting) was the end of my world," she says. "Without this
camp, I don't think I'd be on the street. I think I'd probably be behind
bars. I love this place. I wouldn't take anything in the world to not have
come here."

With the help of David Gill, Valerie and her friends have started T.O.U.C.H.:
Teens Offering Understanding, Compassion and Healing.

The group has held fundraisers for shooting victims and speaks to student
assemblies about school violence.

Five years ago, when Valerie Webb got off that borrowed bus expecting the
worst, the campers were just children. Now they're teenagers: bys with a
sheen of peach-fuzz and hats cranked around backwards, girls in shorts and
ponytails against the heat.

It's been awhile since the last tragic moment, when America held its breath
while the dead were counted. The crowd shows those blessedly quiet years.

"The first camp, the kids came clutching their teddy bears," Gill says. "Now
they're coming with their car keys. They're different."

Given that, he says this will probably be the last year for Connection,
unless another tragedy happens.

For now, though, Connection 2002 is still going strong.

The party tonight (August 9, 2002) is billed as "The Night of 100 Hugs," and
as the dancing winds down and the band begins putting away its instruments,
that is exactly what these people are doing.

In the halflight, the campers are going around hugging each other and signing
each other's shirts with colored markers. Cameras flash in the crowd, and for
a moment, things are frozen here, below the rustic cross that stands at the
water's edge.

Anywhere else, with anyone else it would be saccharine, corny. But here, it
works.

After Jonesboro, and Columbine, and Paducah, and Pearl, we grew used to
seeing people clinging to each other on our television screens.

There is something beautiful and pure therefore, in watching some of those
same people giving plain old hugs.

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