In the summer recess between freshman and sophomore years in college, I was invited to be an instructor at a highschool leadership camp hosted by a college in Michigan. I was already highly involved in most campus activities, and I jumped at the opportunity.
About an hour into the first day of camp, ***d the frenzy of icebreakers and forced interactions, I first noticed the boy under the tree. He was small and skinny, and his obvious discomfort and shyness made him appear frail and fragile. Only fifty feet away, two hundred eager campers were bumping bodies, playing, joking and meeting each other, but the boy under the tree seemed to want to be anywhere other than where he was. The desperate loneliness he radiated almost stopped me from approaching him, but I remembered the instructions from the senior staff to stay alert for campers who might feel left out.
As I walked toward him, I said,“Hi, my name is Kevin, and I’m one of the counselors. It’s nice to meet you. How are you？” In a shaky, sheepish voice he reluctantly answered, “Okay, I guess.” I calmly asked him if he wanted to join the activities and meet some new people. He quietly replied, “No, this is not really my thing.”
I could sense that he was in a new world, that this whole experience was foreign to him. But I somehow k