Wediko
With the possible exception of ritualistic cannibalism, I have never seen, heard, or read about cultural phenomena as bizarre as what I witnessed at Camp Wediko.
I was a camper at Wediko about 20 years ago. I was approximately 15 years old. Wediko is a summer camp for maladjusted children and teenagers. You can learn a little about it on their web page here.
There is sort of a main
road in the camp where most of the campers live. This is also where the nurse's
station and cafeteria/recreation hall is. Most of the action went on here. Sort of a main drag. I don't know what Wediko is like now,
but 20 years ago if you walked down this main drag at any given time during the
day, you were likely to see at least one incident of a camper being physically
restrained by counselors. The amount of counselors needed to a restrain a camper
generally depended upon the size of the camper and the amount of resistance
he/she was offering. It generally ranged from 1 to 8 counselors restraining a
child at a time. Usually it was 2 or 3 counselors. They restrained the camper by
crisscrossing their arms around their chest. One of the fascinating aspects of
this phenomenon is that there was none of this on visiting day. During
visiting day my parents were roaming around
Including myself, there
were 8 fellow campers in my bunk. Unlike myself, most
of the kids were underprivileged, coming from the poorer parts of
As I remember, the day consisted of 2 works sessions, consisting of manual labor such as washing dishes in the cafeteria. The work sessions were about 2 or 3 hours long. There were several group therapy sessions. They were long, perhaps an hour and a half. There was a little recreation, such as swimming in the lake—dubbed by my friend Chris, "Leach Loch" because of its blood-sucking inhabitants. "The leaches won't get you if you keep moving," a counselor used to tell me. There was always a bottle of salt around in case someone came out of the water with a leach attached. I never saw anyone come out with a leach but I've heard stories and I did see dead leaches that had washed ashore. It wasn't fun swimming. There was individual counseling sessions with a specific counselor that was assigned to you as a mentor. This happened maybe a few times a week. My mentor counselor was a real asshole. I will get to him later. On Saturday or Sunday—I don't remember which, they would pay us $10.00 and take us out on a field trip. I lost a lot of that money gambling.
I am a mosquito magnet. The mosquitoes sucked me dry. There were no doors to the bunk where we slept. Eventually they put a mosquitoes net up, which helped. I would burry myself deep inside my sleeping bag to evade the mosquitoes. I'll never forget the shrill whine of the masses of mosquitoes trying work their way into my sleeping bag. There seemed to be animosity in their whine. I knew that they were just dumb animals, that they couldn't have emotion, but they really seemed pissed that they weren't sinking their fangs into me. When I awoke, I would find that they always managed, somehow, to get me.
For half the summer I had a cold I couldn't shake. Between that and the mosquito bites it made life physically miserable. In all fairness, when I actually complained about my physical discomfort, they did give me antibiotics to cure my cold and made provisions to significantly reduce the amount of mosquito bites I was getting, which included giving me mosquito repellent and putting up the mosquito net. The staff at Wediko weren't inhuman; more like protohuman.
My mentor counselor had a scruffy beard. He looked like the kind of guy that lived year-round in the woods. Once he went off to take a shit in the woods. When he came back, I looked at him with adolescent awe and asked, "How do you wipe your ass if you're shitting in the woods?" And He replied, "Oh, I just used a leaf." It didn't seem like enough I thought, but I didn't press the issue. I used to poke fun of him in front of my peers, and call him Willamiah Jones because of his woodsiness. "Jeremiah," he told me, "not Willamiah. Willamiah's a women's name." I would give him shit but I never got physical with him or any of the counselors. Once when nobody was around, he physically restrained me in the standard way of crisscrossing my arms around my chest. I don't remember whether it was because I was giving him shit or because I was complaining (he hated my complaining as do most people), but I was not doing anything which was physically threatening to him. He restrained me merely to assert his power and dominance over me. He was looking for resistance and I didn't allow him any form of justification for his violence. I just did a Gandhi number and let my body go limp as melting butter. Not giving him the satisfaction he was looking for was one of the few victories I have ever had in my life. That was the only instance when I was restrained. He embarrassed me a little because some of my peers came by and looked at him restraining me, but it wasn't a big deal as all except for one had been restrained themselfs, on at least one occasion. As the summer progressed, one peer after another would flip out, be restrained, and carried off. We were 15 years old, the big kids, and when we lost it, we usually required a lot of manpower to restrain us. The bizarre thing was that in most cases my peers would flip out over completely ridiculous things. One kid had to be dragged out of a group therapy session when he flipped out because the counselors were given two days off a week, and the campers only one day off. Someone who was not there might argue that the campers were flipping out because they were mentally unbalanced. This however was not the case. It was as though campers felt obligated to flip out, and counselors felt obligated to create an environment where flipping out was not only acceptable, but expected.
Once my mentor literally dragged me out of the cafeteria, in full view of everyone because I was complaining about the shitty cereal they gave us. After he dragged me out, with a stern warning, "You stay until I come back," I escaped into the woods. Camp would be over in only a few days, and I planned on hiding out in the woods for the rest of my stay, eating blueberries for sustenance. Once it got dark though, the steady racket of wild animals compelled me to go back.
I spent the better part of the last few weeks of the summer in voluntary isolation, refusing to be a part of my bunk or engage in any camp activities. I would lie on the grass all day in front of the schoolhouse. People would come around to bring me meals. I'd sleep on the floor of the schoolhouse at night. Some, but not all of the reason why I did this was because I had gotten into a physical fight with one of my peers. He was literally twice my size and the only reason I engaged him in the fight at the time was because it was in the cafeteria where I knew there would be an ample supply of counselors to break up the fight. Still, it was crazy, and I could easily have gotten pretty messed up like the other kids who were crazy enough to tangle with him.
Was Wediko a good place?
Of course not. Was it entirely evil? No. Even my mentor
was not completely bad. The guy taught me how to throw a frisbee backhanded and gave me very
good, obscure mosquito repellant that only a woodsy bastard like himself would
know of. One of the directors of the camp was named Harry. I only remember his
name because my friend Joey used to call him "Dirty Harry" and it used to piss
him off. Harry was one of the nicest guys I ever met. He never talked down to me
like the counselors. Never treated me like a delinquent kid,
but as a person. One of the counselors was Irish. Although he played it
by the book, he was a pretty sweet guy. He used to have the band U2 living
upstairs from him when he lived in
I could easily write a 100 pages about the weirdness that went on at Wediko. But I'd rather not. Wediko was a very sad and agonizing chapter in my life. Before I started this web site I made the decision not to name names when bashing people or institutions unless, in some way, it served to steer others away from the same people who mistreated me. When I was a camper at Wediko, I believe it was a bad place for children. That was, however, 20 years ago, and I am no longer in a position to judge the current state of Wediko. Dr. Hugh Leichtman is currently listed on Wediko's web site as a clinical director. He was at least one of the people who headed up the organization 20 years ago, and I knew him personally, as he did an evaluation of me. I encourage you to read Dr. Leichtman's essay, "Yellow Tulips". If you are a parent considering sending your child to Wediko, I want you to seriously consider whether you want to entrust your child to someone who talks about "yellow tulip brains."
Edward Phillips
11/18/2001
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