First Days at Camp Ho Mita Koda

This week I began my Capstone experience at Camp Ho Mita Koda, an overnight summer camp for children from ages six to fifteen with type one diabetes, located in Newbury, Ohio.  The camp provides a normal summer camp experience for these children and allows them the opportunity to make friends with other kids who can relate to the challenges of living with diabetes.  Most of the campers have been coming to CHMK for many years, and it is something they look forward to every summer.

At camp, the children are extremely active and participate in multiple activities each day including boating, swimming, climbing, arts and crafts, archery, dancing, hiking and sports.  Since the kids are exercising so regularly at camp, their insulin regimens have to be lowered from the doses that they receive on a regular basis at home.  However, the children do not always understand the relationship between exercise and their diabetes management and they frequently complain that they want more insulin, especially overnight.

For my group’s Capstone project, we wanted to find out how much the children age nine to twelve actually knew about exercise and how it relates to diabetes management.  We designed two lesson plans, one about aerobic and one about anaerobic exercise, to teach the kids.

Yesterday I taught my first session to a group of 12 year old girls and it went really well.  They were extremely interested in the information and actively participated in the lesson by answering and asking questions.  I felt really happy that they were so receptive of the information and will now be able to better understand the relationship between aerobic exercise and their blood sugar levels.  Tonight we will teach the second lesson about anaerobic exercise, and I look forward to their active participation again.

While we are teaching the kids for our project, I am also learning a great deal from them as well.  Most of the campers are really willing to share information about diabetes and experiences they have had related to the disease.  I originally thought that the children wouldn't want to talk about it since camp is there chance to get away from everything for a while, but surprisingly most of them talk about their diabetes non-stop! It seems that at camp they are almost proud to have the disease and proud that they know how to manage it on thier own.  I am grateful and happy to be learning so much from the kids, and I anticipate that I will continue to learn more as the summer progresses.