Claire McKenna spent her holidays working in an American summer camp for people with disabilities. Here, she describes the job as the most fulfilling time of her life and reflects about what the experience has taught herIt is 3 am and I am woken by the sound of a woman in my care who has profound learning difficulties. She is screaming and banging her head on the bedposts, which we had already padded to stop her hurting herself. She has cerebral palsy and cannot walk. I get up after a 16 hour day working with her, to discover that her bed is wet and I must change her and the bedding. Despite these almost nightly incidents I can say, with memories tinged only slightly by nostalgia, that the three months I spent in an American summer camp, working with a succession of people like this woman, were the most fulfilling of my life thus far.

Claire worked with children who had a range of disabilities

"Camp," with its saccharine American- style name, represented everything but the image of spoilt American teens at summer camp portrayed on our television screens. The "campers" came mostly from underprivileged homes, and the two weeks they spent in the wilderness were often the highlight of their year. Our job as carers was to make sure that they enjoyed their stay as much as possible.

Their handicaps covered a whole range of physical and mental disabilities, ranging from mild to profound. The campers were divided into "cabins" depending on their functional ability so that the most severely mentally disabled people, who were not able to function independently, were grouped together, as were people with "milder" disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I was assigned to work with the wheelchair using campers, some of whom had only walkers or braces, because I had previous experience working with wheelchair users.

To say that my job was stretching is to understate it. Working on a one to one basis with campers, I was responsible for their feeding, medical care, bathing, dressing, and entertainment. Then, before bedtime, the whole camp came together for activities. We had "camper talent," when the campers dressed up as anything from vampires to clowns, which required an extreme amount of ingenuity given the materials on hand. We also had "staff talent," when we entertained the campers by making fools of ourselves. Not only did the campers love seeing their carers on stage, but it was a huge bonding experience for us.

You practically had to have eyes in the back of your head to look after these campers; many hilarious moments were had as we watched counsellors running at full pelt a couple of metres behind their camper. Every single thing had to be locked up as many of the campers ate anything and everything in their path; stones, leaves, bits of bag, moths--you name it. We had to sweep the camp grounds every morning to make sure that there was nothing that could harm the campers if they put it in their mouths.

After learning coolly to regard a woman's 10 minute screaming tantrums until she gave up, and to understand that when she bit me it was an outpouring of her personal frustration, I feel that I have developed incredible patience. Many of the campers had epilepsy, and it was heartbreaking to watch one boy's eight minute long grand mal seizure, knowing that all I could do was make sure he didn't bang himself on anything. Ambulances were unfortunately a regular occurrence at camp. Many of the campers had seizures so often that they had to wear helmets permanently to protect their heads from being damaged by a violent fit.

Most of all I learned so much about what it is to live with disability for both campers and their families, who never get a break from their commitments as carers. In fact most of the campers, some of them as young as 10, lived in care homes, as their families were no longer able to go through the ordeal of the 24 hour care they needed. The people I looked after, ranging from 10 to 50 years in age, overwhelmed me with their perceptiveness and their ability to love, but most of all the simple way in which they looked at the world. There I was, this educated, supposedly successful individual, learning more from these people than I could from years at university.

The Holy Grail of camp was to make a camper smile. One of my campers was a little girl with profound learning difficulties who sat morosely in her wheelchair all day, and when you looked into her eyes it was like facing a brick wall--nothing could get through. One day as I held this fragile, limp, little doll in the swimming pool she started to smile and flicked her fingers in the water, obviously enjoying the sensation of coolness around her. I brought her swimming every day from then on.

"Camp" was a revelation in many ways. The enormous cultural diversity of the carers, who came from 27 different countries, ranging from Colombia and South Africa to Korea and Russia, was an education in itself. I have a picture taken by the camp photographer--a close up of a white carer's hand cradling the hand of a black camper. To me this picture encapsulates what camp was about: reaching out across divides of many kinds: social, physical, and racial.