Alumni of the Month

Greetings!!

Since my last glorious summer at Matawa, I’ve been quite busy! I graduated from UW-Madison in December of 2007 with a degree in Music Education. I’m currently in my second year as the choral and general music teacher at Fontana Elementary School in Fontana, WI. I have 300 wonderful 4K-8th grade students that keep me on my toes. I constantly bring camp into my classroom. My students, both big and small, absolutely LOVE the Moose song... it’s their favorite by far.

This summer I bought a beautiful home in Vernon, WI, and will hopefully get a furry dog this summer to keep my company. I still love running (Go Roadrunner!) and I still feel the urge to high five every person who passes me... so not much has changed in that department!

There is a whole lot of Matawa spirit in me; it helped shape my character, and continues to seep into everything I do.

In the spirit of Matawa,

Tracy Mallon

My name is Eileen Grimm and I worked at Camp Matawa from 2003 through 2005 as a counselor for summer programs and throughout the off-season.  I loved working with all of the adventure campers.  I look fondly back at planning cabin activities such as star gazing, spud, trust walks, and my favorite, village campouts with s’mores, foil dinners, songs, and a camp fire.  I enjoyed teaching everything from fishing to shelter building, but my favorite activities were rock climbing, mountain biking, and sweets and treats.  Also, I could not wait to wake up very early in the morning to assist with Road Runner.  The kids who joined in were amazing.  During my last two years at Matawa, I co-taught Teen Extreme (TX) and the Ropes Challenge.  My favorite memories of TX are camping and climbing at Devil’s Lake.  During Ropes Challenge, I loved seeing what type of container my kids would create for their egg drop off of the tower. 

Camp was my job throughout school at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.  When I finished college I also stopped working at Camp Matawa.  After college and camp, I moved to Eugene, Oregon with my friends Nick Deardorff and John Petty, two former Matawa staff.  Today, I have been living in Eugene for over three years and enjoy many aspects of Oregon.  I am a student at the University of Oregon where I am pursing physical therapy.  I still work with kids, tutoring college students.  I also work at a local running company.  Eugene has a big running population, which has helped me pursue running goals.  I recently completed the 113th Boston Marathon.  When I am not busy I enjoy hiking and going to the coast.  I hope everyone is doing well and is still carrying around the Spirit of Camp Matawa. 

Cheers,

Eileen Grimm

My name is Craig Dawson and I was the Program Director at YMCA Camp Matawa in 2000 and 2001. These were two of the greatest summers of my life. I feel proud to have been associated with Camp Matawa during those early years, and that many of the campers who were there during those years became staff, including the current Summer Camp Director Annie Hernandez, while others like Nick Deardorff and John Petty became such large parts of camp.  Matawa for me is about so many things; it’s about making friends, working hard and giving children a summer that they'll never forget. From my very first experience of riding a horse (and I wasn't very good at it), to Thursday night pool parties, Matawa created memories that I will always cherish.

After leaving camp I worked in the IT department for the YMCA of Metropolitan Milwaukee where I was the Director of Information Technology. While this may seem very different from camp, the lessons I learned while working at camp prepared me for many of the things I get to do today. But life is full of circles and here I am 8 years later back at Camp Matawa and Camp Minikani working as the Director of Business Operations taking care of much of the behind the scenes things that happen to make camp a big success each year. Now thought I have two wonderful kids of my own Jayden and Liam. Jayden's just turning 5 and is getting the chance to try out day camp for the very first time, and in a few short years will too have the opportunity to go to resident camp and experience many of the wonderful things that happen at camp.

As I sit here trying to figure out what exactly is interesting enough about me to write about, I am fondly remembering my times at Matawa.  Somehow it simultaneously feels like yesterday and another lifetime.  I stumbled into Matawa for the first time in the summer of 2001 and found it hard to leave, even in the summer of 2005 when I left to attend graduate school in Oregon.  And that is where I am today, at the University of Oregon currently working on a Ph.D in Geology with a specialization in Volcanology. This basically means I study volcanoes for a living.  It has nothing to do with Star Trek although my dad still chuckles every time I say ‘volcanologist.’  Anyway, I currently have a couple of projects; one of which deals with large blocky lava flows and creating 3-dimensional topographic maps to try and understand them better; and the other project deals with submarine (underwater) volcanoes.

In fact I am leaving tomorrow (March 31st) to fly out to Guam and catch a research vessel to spend two weeks looking at an active underwater volcano in the Mariana Arc (south of Japan).  A group of researchers and I visited this volcano (and several others) in April 2006 and found it to be currently active and explosively erupting. This is the first submarine volcano to be observed and filmed explosively erupting and ejecting material.  The observations and the samples we collected were through the use of a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), or submersible.  Sometimes shows on the Discovery Channel have cool video of small submersibles or ROVs checking out deep sea environments or wrecked ships. This is the same thing, but our sub is unmanned since it would be too dangerous to put people by an explosively erupting volcano underwater.

This trip was the opportunity of a lifetime for me and I was basically handed a dissertation topic.  For those of you not familiar with graduate studies, a dissertation is a ridiculously long, complicated research paper that you have to write to graduate and receive a Ph.D in any field.  So my project focuses on how submarine volcanoes erupt, describing the dynamics of the eruptions we observed and the samples we collected.  As I mentioned earlier, we are heading out this week to check to see if the volcano is still active and still erupting.  All indications say it is and we hope to make some Hi-def video observations and collect some more samples.  Perhaps someday this will be on Discovery.  A boy can only hope.

So my life today is mostly composed of sitting in an office writing up my dissertation research and taking the occasional class.  Occasionally I break out and go hiking in the Cascade wildernesses and mountains or even get to fly to the tropics to study submarine volcanoes.  It all sounds pretty darn nice on paper anyway.  And yet, I still sit and reminisce about Camp Matawa, sitting on the athletic field and watching shooting stars, hanging out on the bridge late at night, playing mud soccer, singing ridiculous songs at the campfire, and walking in the Kettle Moraine woods in deep winter around dusk with 8 inches of fresh snow.  Camp Matawa was my life for close to five years and I will forever be grateful for the friends, memories and life lessons learned within the loving arms of Matawa.  Working at camp taught me how to handle difficult and sometimes stressful situations, how to be patient when teaching, how to guide someone to a conclusion without telling them the answer, and instilled in me that it is alright to LOVE your job completely. At the risk of sounding too cheesy, Matawa has helped shape me into the person I am today.

My future is, as the future tends to be, somewhat unknown. I have another year or more until I finish my Ph.D in volcanology.  I intend to continue in academia as a university professor somewhere I can continue studying submarine volcanoes, although I may have to complete a post-doctoral position or work at a research institute before that dream position is acquired. I do know that I have a very beautiful and fantastic fiancé whom I will marry in summer 2010. I also know that wherever I am the Spirit of Matawa will be with me, along with the memories and wonderful friends I have from the good ol’ days working at camp. No matter what area code or country we reside in we all have the same camp, where the current begins.

Nick Deardorff

Ps. There will be a blog at http://nwrota2009.blogspot.com/ which should be updated semi-daily, as long as everything goes to plan. This is run through NOAA and their Ocean Explorer program.

I’m on the Camp Matawa website?! This is like flagpole online!

But before I start singing Little Miss Muffet, I should introduce myself.  I was a counselor at camp from 2005-2006, working my fair share of year-round events in between.  Ah, the days of camp… I miss the Kick Start in the morning, teaching trash craft, making foil dinners, and most of all… Pizza Pockets!  Just kidding, I miss campers the most, but boy do I miss Pizza Pockets too.

My days at camp taught me a lot.  It showed me a lot about working together with a team, about how important it is to communicate with people, and how to handle myself in difficult situations.  It also made me realize how easy it was to put every ounce of your effort into something when you believe in what you’re doing (I know, cheesy, but true!).

But Rishi, you ask, I haven’t seen you or heard from you in two and a half years!  What have you been doing?

Well, I’m glad I made you ask! In March of 2007, I embarked on a journey that took me to the other side of the world.  Even farther than Mauthe Lake! You see, I joined the US Peace Corps, which is a part of the government that sends people to corners of the world where people might not be as fortunate as we are here in the US, and we do our best to help in any way we can.  My assignment sent me to Uganda which is in the eastern part of Africa.

My job was to live and work in a village for over two years, helping my community with their problems in education.  More specifically, I was helping to train teachers and principals in 29 elementary schools around my area.  This is an area where Uganda is really struggling because there is a HUGE shortage of teachers.  In Uganda, parents used to have to pay money to send their kids to elementary school, otherwise their kids would have to stay home.  Eventually, people decided that this was unfair to people who couldn’t afford to pay, so they made school free for everyone.  This was a really noble idea, but the schools were suddenly flooded with kids!

In addition to the fact that there were now four times as many kids in schools, there were only half as many teachers.  Although Uganda has started to find peace, they suffered through several civil wars, and have been fighting the spread of a very bad disease called AIDS.  These two things have taken the lives of millions of people in Uganda, and means that there aren’t as many adults as there should be.  In fact, half of Ugandans are under 15 years old (trekkers or younger).  This means that there are a lot more kids than there are adults.  Sometimes, one classroom will hold 400 students!  This is why we are trying to train as many new teachers as we can, and make sure that the teachers in schools right now aren’t overwhelmed by the challenges they face.

So I lived there for two years, without electricity or running water (so don’t complain that the upper cabins don’t have air conditioning) riding around on my bicycle and meeting people.  I learned a new language called Ateso, met a lot of amazing people, sang camp songs (Ugandan kids’ favorite camp song: Icky Gooey.  Ugandan adults’ favorite camp song: Aroostasha), ate lots of crazy foods (grasshoppers, termites, ostrich, crocodile, wildebeest and more!), and visited a lot of cool places.  I finished my service and travelled around a bit, visiting places like Somalia, and Djibouti, and really remote places like Rossco’s house in London and Benni’s house in Wales. 

Now I’m back in Chicago, trying to join the Foreign Service which is another part of the government. They send people called “diplomats” to other countries to represent the American government.  In the mean time, I’ll be hanging around, working some job or another, volunteering (http://www.826chi.org/), and enjoying hot showers and refrigerators.

Take care guys, and keep the Matawa spirit alive!

-Rishi