Summers at Camp Ethnicity

In the afternoon, a group of second-graders are getting a lesson in yoga from a pretty blond instructor, who reads them a story -- "How Ganesh Got his Elephant Head" -- before leading them through yoga exercises -- downward facing dog, standing tall trees. "Do you know what yoga is?" she asks them. "It's Indian," offers one little girl, helpfully. "It's a way to relax your body," says another.

The kids sit cross-legged, press their palms together and dutifully repeat the "ommm" of their teacher. "Feel the vibrations going through your body," she says with eyes closed and a placid smile on her face. The children obediently follow her directions, as she explains to them: "Yoga unites your mind and your body!"

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Heritage camps, as long as they take place in the U.S. and last for a week or a weekend, cannot provide an experience that could be called cultural immersion. At East Indian camp, kids rush from class to class every hour, getting brief instruction in a number of subjects that few of them will ever use at home. A child will learn a few yoga poses, but is unlikely to get a historical background of traditional Indian practice. And while the younger children seem to absorb some of the basic ideas -- it's Indian, it relaxes your body -- there is little guidance on what it all means.

This doesn't mean that the kids don't seem to enjoy what they are doing. The little kids especially tend to throw themselves into the crafts, dancing classes and games. One of the most popular events of the weekend for the small children is what is billed as the Holi Festival; in India, this is the "festival of colors" which welcomes the spring, during which celebrants fling colored powder and water on each other as a celebration of life's "brightness." At East Indian Heritage Camp, the kids are simply ushered to a soccer field, where they are handed squirt bottles filled with tempera paint and encouraged to make a total mess.

No one has bothered to tell them what the festival symbolizes -- it's too hard to coordinate, I'm told, since the kids often arrive at the field at different times -- but the kids don't really seem to care. They simply grab the squirt bottles and go wild, until everyone on the field is screaming with laughter and covered from head to sneakered foot in brilliant blobs of paint.

The teens, however, are a different story. Many have been attending for years (a majority of camp attendees are repeat visits). And although they are given the most lenience in their schedules, and attend advanced classes with more cultural context -- Indian cooking, cricket, music lessons, history discussions -- they can be indifferent, if not resentful, about the whole package.

One afternoon, in a stuffy cabin far from the central gymnasium, teens are being taught how to make rose punch and raita, a dish of cucumbers and yogurt. Some girls cluster around the teacher, Purnima Voria, a dimpled woman in a sari and bindi who talks a little like Martha Stewart with an accent. "Cooking is an art," she says, carefully arranging peppers on the top of the dish. "Don't be afraid to take it a little further." The teenage boys slump in chairs as far away from the table as possible, with the exception of a few boys who seem to be mostly enjoying their close proximity to the girls.

The real activity is outside the cabin, where a group of girls in tight jeans and belly-baring tops -- they've chosen not to don the required camp T-shirt -- sit and flirt with boys in skate shorts and basketball jerseys. Jared Juy, a kinetic 14-year-old who does proudly wear his camp T-shirt, shows an ebullient enthusiasm for the camp in general; but he doesn't seem to care much for the cultural classes. Mostly the camp is a way to meet girls. "I've gone every year since this camp started. It's great, I get to see all my friends, and girls," he says, as he wraps his arms around a pretty friend. "The best thing here is freedom from your parents."

His companion, 16-year-old first-time attendee Tasha Condie from Utah, is less overtly enthusiastic about the weekend; her parents have brought her here at a friend's recommendation, and although she says she's having an "OK time," she would rather socialize than learn how to cook or play cricket. "We need to party," she explains, "... and they need to bring a TV."

"They'll show movies later," Jared points out.

Tasha rolls her eyes: "Yeah, Indian movies, to be exact."

At one point, toward the end of the weekend, one of the volunteer camp coordinators has clearly reached her limit with the teens' apparent boredom. She pulls the teens into a room and begs them to tell her what they would want to do in future years. More culture classes? Language classes? Nothing at all?

One girl suggests Hindi classes; another wants to learn ancient Indian history. But most teens simply nod in agreement with the sentiments of one boy who blurts out: "Let us choose what we want to do, and let us just hang out if we don't want to do anything."

Heritage camps are caught in a bind: What they really need to teach is not what it is to be Indian, but what it is to be Indian-American, which can be different for each child, depending on countless factors. The hope is that the kids will go home armed with cultural knowledge that they'll use to shape their own Indian-American identities. As Susan Soon-keum Cox, vice president of public policy for Holt International heritage camps, posits, "It helps them to understand where they fit in the world: Are they Korean-American or American-Korean? Which goes first? They need to be able to find that balance ... go away proud of the fact that they are part of two cultures and identities."

Identity, however, isn't acquired through cooking classes alone. So while the culture classes -- the sports, the dancing, the games and crafts -- are a colorful lure that brings families to Colorado, it's the discussion groups and socializing with peers that are ultimately the focus of the weekend. Essentially, it's a support group, candy-coated with Indian cooking and ethnic crafts.

Admits Pam Sweetzer: "The culture stuff is mostly a reason to get them here to meet each other."

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