let lemons be angry

(Reposted from a-part, my blog about child abuse)

How one generation loves,


the next generation learns.

This is not about that tear-jerker of a family campaign ad with the mother carrying her feverish son in the rain. But it could be.

I went to the States to see how other people were running the Royal Family Kids Camp. I’d heard that the Americans did it bigger and better, with carnivals for the birthday parties and beauty salons for the little girls. I thought it was money they had more of.

True enough, this camp I went to had a giant hand-painted castle fascade, individual birthday cakes for all 59 kids, and three stretch limos to take the kids for a drive on Everybody’s Birthday.

What I wasn’t expecting:most of the volunteers were grandparents. One of them wheeled himself around on a motorized wheelchair. Grandmothers baked the birthday cakes. One man built all the castle props. One old woman crocheted shawls for all 59 kids. She does that every year. Grandparents ran around playing with the kids, grandparents spent their whole year thinking and praying about the hurt children, and grandparents cheered and bellowed out birthday cheers.

It wasn’t that these people had more to give. But they gave much more. They came out in full force as an army of lovers.

And so even I, a privileged and loved young woman, was overwhelmed to tears every single day. How much more the foster children were.

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The Royal Family Kids Camp is a camp for abused and neglected children. It started in California 20 years ago, and has since expanded to over 100 camps in the US, and more worldwide. It has been in Singapore for 10 years, and I have volunteered for five years so far.