CHANGE MY LOCATION
Youth use technology to overcome disabilities and create music at weeklong summer camp
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The “top three” kids perform with the help of camp counselors during a recent LINC Camp concert.
BALTIMORE (Map, News) - It’s a rare feat, in an age where computers and the Internet have stripped away many of the old pratfalls of social interaction, to force children outside their comfort zones.
It’s even rarer when they depend on that technology for their lives.
And yet Selina Lee, 10, is trying — and having a ball.
Lee has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, which will impair her ability to interact with the world around her — even to do the simplest tasks — for the rest of her life. To do almost anything, at school or at home, she depends on computers.
“She uses computers to access everything,” says her father, John Lee. “Computers are a big part of her life.”
And at a weeklong summer camp organized by Learning Independence Through Computers, an area nonprofit that trains people with disabilities in the use of assistive technologies, Lee is using computers to learn to create music.
There was harmony, dissonance, rhythm and even some techno-pop. But in the end, as Norman Hardy, one of her new friends from the camp, put it, “It all came together.”
Hardy does not have cerebral palsy. Nor does he have Down syndrome, or any of the other cognitive or physical disabilities you might find at the LINC summer camp. He was just there to make music, and friends.
When it was all over at the end of the week, he rattled off a list of the friends — disabled and kids with no disabilities — he had made. And he scurried frantically, pen and paper in hand, to collect their phone numbers so they could stay in touch.
That’s what sets this summer camp apart. There are the usual camps — with bunk beds and campfires — and then there are camps only for disabled kids. LINC is neither. Of the dozen or so children accepted into each of LINC’s two weeklong sessions, about half are disabled, and half are not.
And together, they create music.
“In the friends that they make, they see beyond the disabilities,” camp director Susan Pompa said. For many, she added, “it’s the first time they’ve ever seen someone with a disability.”
And for those whose lives are guided by computers, the camp uses whatever equipment it can — recording software, digital cameras — to make it a memorable and lasting experience.
“There might be some children who are totally nonverbal,” she said, “but they’re able to share their day with their parents.”
Maeve Duffy, who described herself as “almost 12,” is nearly an honorary counselor — she’s been coming to the camp for years.
“I have a brother with Down syndrome, and he [has] kind of been excluded,” she said of life outside the camp.
LINC has given them both the chance, through technology, to reach out beyond their comfort zones.
“It’s kind of nice how everyone gets included, and no one gets left out,” she said, echoing the camp’s ethos. “If one kid can’t do it, no one can.”
sgentile@baltimoreexaminer.com
