For more than 20 years, students, alumni and staff from Molloy University have traveled to Big Laurel Learning Center in Mingo County, W. Va., to serve at a summer camp for teenage boys that enriches both the youths of Appalachia and the visiting New Yorkers.
The experience, scheduled for July 17-25, begins with a 13-hour road trip by van for students and chaperones and by car for alumni. By the time the caravan arrives, many travelers who were strangers at the outset have had a chance to get to know each other.
Those discoveries are the first of many to come over the next week.
This summer, 11 Molloy students are planning to make the journey, along with three adult chaperones and five alumni. The college students serve as camp counselors and one-on-one mentors to the overnight campers in one of the country’s most impoverished areas.
Daily activities make the most of the remote mountain location, with plenty of hiking and opportunities for swimming, including planned trips to a water park and a lake, as well as time for card-playing and other games.
Lessons on ecology and upending the “throwaway” culture are reinforced with zero-waste meals, which emphasize eating all the food you select, and collecting rainwater to use for showering.
With the location out of range for cell phone service, unplugging is the order of the day, said Andrew Abberton, a longtime alumni volunteer who will serve as one of the Molloy chaperones this year.
Abberton, a member of the class of 2013, is now a special education teacher in Freeport. He made his first visit to Big Laurel as a college freshman and this year will be his 11th summer trip to Appalachia.
“You move away from everything you know,” he said. “Emails and texts—all of that drops away, and you can enjoy and be part of this experience.”
The camp roster of 12 to 15 local boys, ages 12 to 18, is kept deliberately small. The numbers allow for increased interaction, as the counselors connect with their charges and keep a close eye on daily details while making sure everyone has fun.
Abberton is not the only returning alumnus, noting that others will make their 13th and ninth trips next month. This year, he was hired to serve as a chaperone since one of Molloy’s campus ministers, Michelle Martin, who normally makes the trip, is on maternity leave. Another Molloy staff member from the admissions office is also attending, as is Sister Diane Capuano, O.P., a member of the leadership team of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Amityville who directs their Young Adult Outreach work.
The Big Laurel Learning Center, located on a mountaintop in rural Kermit, W.V., has been the lifework of Sister Gretchen Shaffer, C.S.J., and Sister Kathleen O’Hagan, S.N.D. For more than a decade after their arrival in Appalachia in 1976, they ran a school for the local community.
When the school closed, the sisters found other ways to serve the community. “There aren’t many people who don’t know Sister Kathy and Sister Gretchen,” Abberton said.
The learning center, which opened in 1990, now hosts the summer camp on its 400-acre land trust in central Appalachia. Other programs include community outreach projects, immersion opportunities and retreats, and long-term volunteer service.
The environment all around is incorporated into the lessons learned by campers and counselors alike. The conditions, featuring no air conditioning and composting outhouses, hold less frills than summer experiences that many are used to. “It’s an adjustment for us, especially the first time, realizing you are not anywhere you have been before,” Abberton said.
Besides the student camp counseling and mentoring, alumni take a more behind-the-scenes role making sure dinner preparations are squared away and perform maintenance tasks such as filling in bare spots in the mountain’s gravel road.
Molloy’s school community also contributes in other ways. An annual raffle and other donations raised more than $1,500 last year for Big Laurel Learning Center projects. A popular item is donated Molloy shirts, which are handed out to campers.
“We have been going for so many years that people who work at Molloy are well aware” of the camp, said Michael Malinowski, a campus minister at Molloy.
The Molloy student-mentors seek “to show the campers the positive aspects of education and what life is like outside the poverty cycle,” Malinowski said.
The New York to Appalachia journey reversed course last year when four of the older campers from West Virginia came to visit Molloy and New York City for a week. They had a chance to connect with their mentors, with whom they normally stay in touch by texting and Facebook posts.
They sat in on college classes and attended career seminars and enjoyed a dinner with 25 alumni. “They were on Cloud 9…One of them said it was the best week of his life,” said Malinowski, who said the experience will be planned every two years.
The pairing of individual Molloy students with campers takes the personalities of both into account to form a good fit. “It makes a lasting impression on the kids and the college students,” Abberton said.
And on the alumni as well. “I’m blessed to see these kids grow up,” he said. “It’s amazing to see how they’ve matured and developed.”
Abberton called his participation at the camp “one of the true pleasures of my life.” During the regular school year, the kids from Big Laurel are “constantly” on his mind. The family dynamics of many in Appalachia are affected by extreme poverty and addiction, he said.
“The biggest thing this trip has taught me Is compassion,” he said. “It’s a huge opportunity for the (Molloy) students. It’s a training opportunity for anything you want to go into.
“If you want to do something and do it well, you have to see all sides of it…Some of these kids don’t have much, but they are so willing to share. They are amazing young men.”