CAMP HEALING HEARTS PHOTOS
A Safe Space
At Camp Healing Hearts, campers spend time doing typical day camp activities like horseback riding, but they also engage in therapeutic activities.
Moments of transcendence can occur at Camp Healing Hearts when kids who have lost someone get a chance to express themselves freely. The day camp is presented by Hospice of Central New York and takes place for a week in August at the YMCA Camp Iroquois in Manlius. It’s open to children in grades 1 through 6 who have lost a relative or friend. The program has been going strong for more than a decade, says Karen Leshko-Balamut, the camp’s director and a licensed clinical social worker. The activities are that of a typical summer day camp: swimming, archery, hiking, horseback riding, arts and crafts. Yet Camp Healing Hearts includes an emotional and therapeutic component, Leshko-Balamut says. “All the activities are designed to allow kids that safe space to talk about their special person.” For camper Demosthenes, 9, that special person was his brother, Elias Mantalios, who died at age 21. Before going to the camp and meeting others the same age who lost loved ones, Demosthenes often felt alone and had trouble connecting with his parents’ grief and his own, says the boy’s father, Nick Mantalios. “There’s that combination of therapy and distractions (from the grief), but they are also dealing with the reality,” Mantalios says. “The activities are kind of like a buffer that helps them to manage that.” Demosthenes wrote about his Healing Hearts experience in an essay, which his parents, Mantalios and Theone Kalkinis, shared. He described a healing circle and hearing a story about a boy’s feelings of sadness and anger after his mother dies unexpectedly. Demosthenes also wrote about typical camp activities like swimming, hiking and canoeing. “The counselors made sure to keep us busy and help us get through our grief with a combination of distraction through the activities and discussions about our loss to help us cope,” he wrote. “I really had a good time at the camp and I feel that it helped me cope with my grief. I’m definitely going back next year again.” On the last day of camp, participants place the memory stone they make in honor of their special person near the fire pit before taking a turn with the microphone to talk about their loved one. Last year, there was an 11-year-old camper who spoke very little the first three days of the camp and didn’t seem to want to open up, Leshko-Balamut says. But on the last day she grabbed the microphone “and pretty much laid everything out.” “You got to see what a difference four days could make,” she says. “It was amazing.”
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