Summer is here and with it, children everywhere are gearing up for a fun-filled, revitalizing and exciting summer season. Ezer Mizion’s summer camps, as you so well know, ensure that even special needs children and children battling cancer can look forward to a memorable and enriching summer camp experience.
This year have introduced upgrades in many of our camps. We are gratified to share with you a sampling.
● Our summer camp for cancer patients and their families is expanding from 2 to 3 sessions. This is an outcome of the growing number of people who have been diagnosed with cancer and are benefitting from Ezer Mizion’s support services. We will have one large camp for both children and adults with cancer and their families. Two smaller camps are each geared separately for sick children and for sick parents. All sessions are geared for the entire family unit. (23 more families and 180 additional campers above last year.)
● We are particularly looking forward to an “Evening of Inspiration”, a unique, empowering show that has been added to the activity schedule for two of the cancer patient summer camp sessions. A group of musicians and singers will present an interactive program that is geared to reveal, revitalize and refresh inner resources for cancer patients and their close family. We know that this program is an intensely moving, enriching experience. Despite its high cost, we have chosen to include it due to its enormous benefit.
● The campus for our girls sleep away camp has been renovated and has been made more accessible for handicapped individuals. This enables us to accommodate an additional 20 campers with serious physical handicaps in each session (40 new handicapped campers!) that we were unable to accept in the past.
● In addition to the physical upgrade that enables handicap accessibility to bunkhouses, showers and facilities, staff and volunteer counselors at our camp for special needs children are undergoing a training course in the care of physically handicapped campers. Training also includes care for the children in and around the swimming pool. This is a dream come true for many of these youngsters. Now that we are able to accommodate so many more physical handicapped campers, word has spread and applications are streaming in.
● Our boys special needs sleep away camp will be featuring a special division for teens and young adults with CP. This is something that has been lacking and whose time has really come.
Our summer camps are warmly endorsed by government bureaus and municipal offices throughout Israel as well as all relevant medical and care establishments. This year we received an especially eloquent letter (in English!) from Professor Isaac Yaniv, Director of the Pediatric Hematology-Oncology Center at Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petach Tikvah. The letter appears in its full form on page 5 of the attached proposal. I would like to quote just one sentence from it here:
“Nothing can compensate for the anguish that childhood cancer inflicts, but the completely free of charge Ezer Mizion camp experience for the whole family and especially for the sick child, provides them with new strengths and tools to continue with their ongoing struggle for cure and a healthy future. … I have witnessed the impact of the camp experience on their coping abilities and compliance thereafter.”
Our summer camps are only possible with the moral backing and generous financial support of dedicated partners and generous friends, yourself foremost among them! We ask you to join us once again in this major summer camp endeavor that is a veritable lifeline for participants and their families.
