Salvation Army camp sends kids to W. Va.

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - A young girl stops in her tracks.  In the remote mountains of West Virginia, she waits, staring down a long, vacant charter bus, ready to prematurely shuttle her back home to distant Baltimore. She waits — her bellicose nature, her predilection for needless sparring bubbling over — and makes a choice.

“I think something just snapped in her,” recalled Lafeea Watson, who was watching. “And she turned.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl exclaimed, running back to the camp behind her. She just didn’t want to go.

After that, things were different.

“By the end, she was singing camp songs,” Watson said.

The girl was only one of the many inner-city kids “who come in a little tough” at the Salvation Army Summer Camp, said Watson, the director of community relations and development for the Salvation Army Baltimore Area Command.

“The idea, number one, is that most of these are inner-city kids,” she said. “The first thing we do is make them feel safe.”

The camp — which started again today — takes about 150 kids from low-income families in the Baltimore area and transplants them, for one week, from the winding alleys and blighted row houses of the city to the rolling hills and unbridled woodlands of West Virginia.

There, they do everything from hiking to swimming to rope-climbing — and they do it for free.

The funding comes entirely from individual donations and area non-profits, such as Kiwanis and the John J. Leidy Foundation, who sponsor portions of the trip.

“It’s the experience of life time,” she said, “if you cannot afford to send your kids to one of those paying camps.”

Watson has herself been on the trip a few times. Not having been a camper, she is sometimes surprised at how fundamentally the experience — only a week long — changes the kids.

“You hear that, people who come back, people who were changed by a week,” she said. “It’s interesting to see the backgrounds.”

For many, it’s the first they’ll ever venture beyond the confines of their often crumbling inner-city neighborhoods — the first time they’ll see animals in their natural habitats, or a looming mountaintop stretching up into the sky.

For Jordan McCoy, 12, of Howard County, choosing the best part of the trip was easy.

“The pool,” she said.

For Jordan, it’s just that simple — the pool.

“It was such a great experience, even for me,” Watson said. “It goes way beyond that week.”

HOW YOU CAN HELP

Contact the Salvation Army Baltimore Area Command at 410-783-2920, or visit www.tsabaltimore.org. Send donations by check or money order to the Salvation Army Baltimore Area Command at 814 Light St., Baltimore, MD, 21230.

sgentile@baltimoreexaminer.com