CIT Meeting
Today the CITs all met with Warren Huff, the camp director, in his office to talk about the Five Fundamentals of Cedars Camps. CIT stands for counselors in training. These young people are doing this special program to learn how to be a great counselor for the campers at Cedars. They get to act as counselors, living in cabins with the campers and helping with activities, to get the full hands-on experience. They learn how to help campers grow in Christian Science as well as grow themselves.
All the CITs sat around in a circle while Warren went through all the five concepts and helped everyone fully understand what they meant. The five fundamentals are:
1. We regard each individual at camp as a child of God, who reflects alertness, joy, peace, ability, love…
2. We respect each individual Christian Science young person as a future active worker in the Christian Science movement.
3. We stand firm in our desire to use Christian Science in all of our actions and to be good examples.
4. We believe that all have certain interests and talents, and we want to do all we can to further these and at the same time to introduce new activities and interests.
5. We expect to make camping at the CEDARS fun!
Warren explained the concepts very thoroughly and told the CITs why we had each one. When he was describing how each camper reflects alertness, joy, peace, ability, and love, he said that joy ‘should be like a thermostat, not a thermometer because it shouldn’t be affected by the consequence.’ The CITs chanted each fundamental together, and then one did individually. It’s important for staff at Cedars to have them all memorized so that they can give the campers the best experience possible.
The CITs also had a discussion about the Junior Leadership program that Cedars offers. One camper who had been in JL said, “You are expected to know more as camper, you’re not told every little thing. You make your own food, which is really fun in the palace; you get to go shopping for that. You get to experience all the trips, like caving and the float trip. Probably the most fun I had was the green and white field night. You actually get to run your own activity and be counselor for a night. You make sure these kids have a lot of fun and its just great to see them all excited. You’re getting ready to be a leader so the counselors are throwing you little bits of advice like “you can be a leader like this…” or, “this is how you can make this a group activity for everybody…” Brandon
