I lead a double life. During the school year, I am the professional sophisticated grown-up educational coordinator of Earthen Vessels tutoring. I meet with teachers, parents and tutors; make phone calls, give advice and generally coordinate things. Kids think of me as the lady who is always checking up on them at school. During the summer, I put on my sneakers, T-shirts and cut-off jeans, throw my hair in a ponytail and hit the mountains. Kids think of me as someone to hug, bother, race with, give a backrub to, tickle or scare in the dark. What’s the connection? Well, these kids and those kids are the same kids, with the same needs, the same hurts, and the same basic motivations. These are the kids who say “I can’t,” because everything around them tells them so.

    All year long, kids see me (and Marie-Claude, and possibly their tutor too) as someone who is nagging them to do better in school. “Do your homework.”  “Study hard for that test.” “Don’t cut class.”  “Try to improve.” Some of it may sink in (in fact, we hope that all of that nagging does have a long-term positive effect), but very often, at a conscious level, what a kid is thinking is, “Why are these people bugging me so much? Don’t they know I can’t do it?”  Then summer rolls around and, bam, they find themselves in a place where, again, we are making demands on them, but the rules are different. Camp is a place where, if you want to eat, you have to cook, do the dishes, or serve the table. This is a place where you learn team sports, like volleyball, and get good at them. This is a place where you are pushed, prodded and cajoled to the top of a mountain, to be rewarded with a stunning view and a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone on the drive back to camp. This is a place where fights are not punished but resolved, and this is a place where the grown-ups eat, sleep, work and play with you. They don’t just tell you what to do; they are doing it too. What a different world! At camp, kids and adults come together to form a family. This family has rules and expectations. This family also has compassion and patience. This family does not accept “I can’t.”

    Back to Boston. September comes. School begins. “Here come these people bugging me about my homework again... Well, I’m glad someone cares about what I do in school... Hey, Julie, have you seen Jamille? What about Kenny?... Yeah, I will study. I’m trying... I know, I’m an eagle, not a chicken, right?” Coming to camp doesn’t guarantee success in school. But what it does guarantee for those kids is that, for two weeks out of the summer, they heard “You can do it” every day, and they lived “You can do it” every day. For two weeks they laughed and played and yelled and cried and went to bed in a place that was perfectly safe. For two weeks they knew that someone cared and someone believed in them.

    After returning from camp, kids go back to their city ways. They have to—it’s a matter of survival. Gotta be tough. Gotta watch your back. But somewhere in that armor, there’s a new chink. And when the “Do-your-homework”s and “Go-to-class”s start pouring in again, they do not roll off as easily. They find some little place to filter in. They fall on some seeds planted in the fresh Vermont soil. Those seeds are the two weeks of “You can do it” and “You are worth it,” and at tutoring they are watered afresh, sometimes by new gardeners, and sometimes by the same old ones. Sometimes it takes years of watering. Sometimes you are ready to give up when—Wait! I see it! It’s a bud. A leaf. It is growing. That sturdy and beautiful plant called “I can do it” is growing up among the cracks in the city sidewalks.