It is difficult to overstate the impact CRS had on me during those pivotal years. As an energetic and sometimes stubborn teenager, Camp helped me start to find a place in the world by providing grounding experiences, while also making it clear that the world is a much stranger—yet also kinder—place than I could’ve ever imagined. My experience at Camp was filled with vulnerability, new people, ideas, and challenges, inspiring Tent Talks, spaces,
and opportunities to share in the wisdom and passions of other very intelligent people many of whom I consider lifelong friends despite the distance.
The exposure to sociocultural diversity I encountered at Camp led me to, among other things, seek diverse spaces eventually leading me towards interfaith work. It was through the words of one interreligious scholar that I came to appreciate diversity in a new light. Framing diversity through the lens of pluralism, Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith Youth Core, urges us to come together to build a better civic life not despite but because of our differences. Seeing an increasingly connected global community, pluralism, in this sense, seeks to shift narratives of unity away from seeing ourselves as a homogeneous ‘melting pot’ and instead of working towards concocting a harmonious ‘salad bowl’ of diverse peoples whose unique values and identities don’t have to be sacrificed in order to fit into the social fabric.
Many years later, even within Interfaith and racial diversity work, I’ve yet to find a comparable group or organization that is successful in building a global community spanning so wide in terms of space and time as CRS. Throughout my young adult life, I’ve reflected on the connections I made during that time, the friendships, laughs, ideas, successes, and let downs that shaped a group of would-be strangers into a cohesive community devoted to helping each other become better people. During that time, too, I did away with apprehensions showing intellect out of fear of seeming ‘nerdy,’ and have since looked for knowledge and people with which I can mimic this sort of synergistic culture.