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Posted on: 2/8/2010 The article below was written by one of our 7 week campers Marion for her class speech. Marion has attended Ak-O-Mak for two years for our 7 weeks session. When it came time to write a speech for school this year Marion decided to talk about her summer at camp and we are pleased to share the speech with our fellow parents, campers and alumni. Have you ever lived in a cabin with no electricity for seven weeks? Well, I have...at Camp Ak-O-Mak! Imagine being away from your parents, brothers, sisters and pets for the whole summer and living with ten other kids you’ve never met from all over the world. Sound scary? Well, I thought so, too, the first time I went away to summer camp. But instantly, I met so many nice people it wasn’t scary after all. In fact, I had the time of my life! At camp I got to try 25 different sports. Although Ak-O-Mak is world famous as a swim camp, we also learned to kayak, canoe, sail, play tennis, do archery, and play beach volleyball. But these are just a few of the sports we did. We also played soccer, lacrosse, baseball and rode mountain bikes! Sooo, did you guys enjoy sleeping in on your summer vacation? While you were still snoring under the blankets, I was up at 7:20 every morning to do something called “Early Bird”. The Main House bell would clang and everyone was up out of bed and either running, swimming or paddling a canoe for a mile or two before breakfast. I usually ran two miles cross country. It got a bit easier every day and I really liked my counsellors, Vanessa, Emily and Kate, who would encourage me to go a bit further every day. Other fun things we did at camp was Canada day with a bunch of crazy activities like a maple syrup licking contest, ball wrestling when you’re covered in slippery soap suds and RAAAAAAMBOOOOOOOO! Let me tell you about Rambo... Rambo is just one of the activities we compete in as teams for points over the whole summer. Rambo can happen anytime. We never know when. Rambo is dirty. Rambo is wet. When the signal is given, each team immediately goes into action... putting on their grungiest clothes, duck-taping cuffs and shoes, bug spray? Check! Sunscreen? Check! Pearls or jewels? AAAAAGH! Mission: to retrieve your precious team flag that has been stolen and hung somewhere in the swampy forest. All team members have to remain together, helping each other find their way...running through the forest, climbing over logs, wading through the swamps and eventually returning home with their flag. Sometimes it’s 3 hours later when our team comes running, mud-soaked and tired, out of the forest and back to camp, hoping we had the fastest time. Mission accomplished! This summer I also got to do War Canoe. “So what’s a war canoe”? you ask. It’s a big, long wooden boat that holds seven paddlers on each side and a person who steers in the back, called the cox. This is a true Canadian sport and originated with our First Nations people. It’s a lot harder than it looks because you have to paddle balancing on one knee and staying in time with everyone else in the boat. We even competed in a regatta in North Bay and after racing neck and neck for 500 meters, we came in second by a nose-hair!! Swimming is one of my most favourite things to do in the world. Even though I took swimming lessons at home, I REALLY learned to SWIM at Camp. Every day we had a swim practice in the pool which was built right in to the lake, lane lines and everything! The coach would teach us proper strokes and each day I got better and better. Finally I could swim well enough to participate in the Triathlon. Even us little kids swam the half a mile across the lake, ran the 2 and a half mile trail and then paddled a canoe back across the lake! If someone had told me that, by the end of the summer, I would run a 12 k, swim in a lake (never mind across it!), parade through the forest like I knew where I was going and eat chocolate pudding with no hands, and learn a gazillion new songs, I never would have believed them! I still can’t believe it sometimes! If I can do this when I,m 8, I wonder what I can do when I’m 10 or 15?? When I think back on it, I realize how much help and encouragement my counsellors Vanessa, Kate and Emily gave me to do these things....I just had to TRY. I had to find the tiniest bit of courage and believe that I could do it. Sure, I was scared at times. But I always kept going.