As a Brit, watching the World Cup come to America has brought up some familiar feelings. The cynic in me sees various Europeans gallivanting across the United States, amazed by a Buc-ee’s with 100 gas pumps, and thinks: “Why are they so impressed?” But their wide-eyed discoveries also remind me of when I fell in love with America.
In the summer of 2014, fresh out of my second year at university in England, I applied for something called Camp America. Part cultural exchange, part babysitting, it is a program that for over 50 years has offered Brits in their 20s the chance to work at summer camps in the U.S. I found out about it because my mom worked at a camp in Poughkeepsie, New York, during the 1980s. She told me it was the best thing she had ever done. I didn’t believe her, but I thought I would give it a go anyway.
This article is featured in America at 250. Sign up here to get an update every time a new piece is published. In return for a few hundred pounds, Camp America agreed to set me up with a summer camp somewhere in America, sorting out my visas and making sure that I got paid. The rest was up to me. From my university dorm in a gray English town, I chose an option that seemed as good as any other: a small, slightly scruffy Jewish camp called Berkshire Hills Eisenberg Camp, or BHEC for short. It was in Columbia County, New York, with a lake, a ropes course, and a cheerful website that looked like it was made in the 1990s. The nearest town was a one-stoplight kind of place that somehow sustained a deli, a gas station, and a diner. I remember arriving there in early June and feeling like I had stepped onto a movie set.
I had been to America before, and even lived in California for a few months, but never as an adult. Like many Europeans raised on a diet of American culture, I thought I understood the States. I knew that the people were loud and ambitious, that they didn’t care about the world beyond their borders, and that they loved guns and big sodas and baseball.
