Push Camp

Over Spring Break I went to Camp ASCCA in Jackson’s Gap, Alabama to help renovate the camp’s buildings and make it generally more handicap accessible. Camp ASCCA is a camp specifically designed to fit the needs of handicap people of all forms and ages. The various activities at the camp are tailored to let people who suffer from any ailment participate in all events. Our job was to help make the camp more safe and fun. Ages of people at the camp range from 5 to 83. My fraternity, Pi Kappa Phi, has its own philanthropy called Push America. Push used to be an acronym for People’s Units for the Severely Handicapped. As the acronym might hint, the philanthropy specifically targets making places more handicaps accessible. Within Push America there are many activities and events that you can do. I chose to do what’s called Push Camp. Push Camp is where you spend five days of your Spring Break constructing and renovating buildings and play units. Other brothers from the fraternity came from places as far as Indiana to join in a good cause (and to go to Panama City afterwards). Projects ranged from building a deck for a water slide to lopping thorns bushes in horse pastures. The work was hard, but in the end it was extremely gratifying. The highlight of the trip was a visit from an elderly home for mentally and physically disabled people. The visitors had a wide range of ailments, but they were definitely a lively bunch. When they came to the camp we broke up into groups and did various things such as basketball, putt putt golf, and fishing. After doing these activities we all met up in the gym to hang out and dance. After talking to some of the visitors, I began to realize they were like normal people who just wanted to have equal access to fun. Upon realizing this I got instant gratification for the work I was doing for these future campers. Talking to them really did help dispel my preconceived notions that they were less outgoing and less prone to have fun. This, however, I found was far from true. Look at my video if you don’t believe me. Some anthropological concepts I used were the emic perspective and cultural relativism. I used the emic perspective by getting them to tell me how their lives were different and similar in general in comparison to ours. I used cultural relativism to understand the disabled community through their own terms and not viewing their lives from my perspective.