Camp’s Olympics Bring Sighted Kids to the Blind

When a small couch fire broke out in his house a few months ago, before running for his life, 10-year-old Jason Thomas first rushed to rescue his most precious possession: a track-and-field gold medal he had won at Camp Bloomfield’s Olympics.

Jason, of Palmdale and legally blind, won that medal last year holding hands on a sprint with his fully sighted partner, Brandon Jacobs, 9, of Agoura.

“I don’t let anyone touch it,” said Jason, a rascally camper whose blindness and a host of other medical problems began when he came into the world weighing just 14 ounces.

Last year was the first year the camp for the blind and visually impaired teamed Jason and other camp residents with sighted kids from the community to compete together in the Olympics. It was also the first year the camp opened the activities to about 800 Malibu-area residents who enjoyed food, music and the athletic competitions.

Today, the Olympic spirit again will fill the camp as hundreds of community members are bused into the usually quiet canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains to enjoy the festivities and to watch Jason and Brandon--among other paired-up kids--compete for the gold.

“I think we’re going to win because me and Jason are really fast runners,” said Brandon, a fourth-grader with a gentle demeanor who decided to participate in the program last year after he saw a flier at his Cub Scout meeting.

Down a narrow road a few miles from the beach on Mulholland Highway, Camp Bloomfield has served the blind and visually impaired from throughout the country since 1953. California’s only other camp for the blind is in Napa.

The philosophy of the foundation is to teach the blind practical skills.

“We want them to gain the greatest independence to participate in life,” said Dena Schulman, director of communications for the Foundation for the Junior Blind, which runs the camp.

Each summer at the camp, about 600 children and some adults enjoy traditional camp activities, such as horseback riding, swimming, hiking and petting some farm animals.

Because the camp is specialized, not many of the children or staff are local, and the campers are guided through their experiences by an international roster of counselors. But the organization wanted to make the camp known to Malibu-area and West San Fernando Valley residents and promoted the Olympics with such organizations as the Malibu Chamber of Commerce, Little Leagues and Cub Scouts--partly to enlist sighted kids.

For Jason and Brandon, the Olympics did not suddenly transform them into lifelong friends, but it did leave a mark, giving Jason his prized medal and Brandon a life lesson.

“I liked helping another person, and running with [Jason], and winning a medal,” Brandon said last week. “It made me appreciate other people.”

A small boy who swims at home, cuddles with a puppy and plays with younger sister Brooke, Brandon saw a different world at the camp, said his mother, Karen Jacobs.

“He is a very sensitive and caring individual,” she said. “I think he was able to see kids who are not as healthy as he is. We have to thank our lucky stars.”

The experience also changed Jason, said Laine Wilkins, Jason’s legal guardian, who has cared for him since she took him home weighing just 4 pounds at 4 months of age.

“That was just so wonderful to him,” she said. “The confidence, the self-esteem just shot up--that feeling of ‘I accomplished.’ ”

But not all of life has been so wonderful for Jason, known among the counselors as a hard-to-handle camper with an overabundance of energy.

He was born premature to a drug-abusing mother at a time when medical care for such babies less advanced than today and preemies died at a higher rate, said Wilkins, who is a nurse.

“He wasn’t expected to live,” Wilkins, who has three grown children of her own and has rescued two other unwanted babies from the hospital, said recently while visiting the camp. “But 10 years later, here we are.”

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Now in fifth grade, Jason attends special-education classes. Aside from his severe visual impairment, he also has attention deficit disorder and suffers from seizures.

It’s a task to get him to concentrate on his homework back home, Wilkins said. But once he gets interested in his favorite subject, spelling, he’ll go on and on, writing out words she gives him, or spelling them out loud. By then it’s even harder to make him stop and go to bed.

“Once he’s focused, he stays focused,” Wilkins said. “The bad part about that is that it’s hard to pull him away from games, too.”

The camp staff sympathizes.

Earlier this week, a slender but confident Jason--sporting a blue tank top, purple shorts, untied sneakers and struggling to find his way through a pair of thick glasses--walked in the pool area.

“Jason Thomas,”--most counselors call him by his full name for emphasis--”if you want to go in the pool you’re going to have to take your shirt off,” yelled Tobias Ekmark, a 22-year-old counselor from Sweden.

“I don’t want to,” yelled Jason, running away. His head was white from what appeared to be a full bottle of lotion he poured on himself.

“Jason, what are you doing?” the counselors yelled through the hourlong pool session. “Jason, come back! Jason, get in the pool!”

“He’s a good kid underneath it all,” said Kate Wansberough, 23, a counselor from Australia.

“I get in trouble a lot,” Jason confessed during a rare moment of stillness. (Another moment came when he hit his head on a corner of the bleachers.)

He also confessed that, besides his favorite horse at the camp stable, Goldie, he likes the attention of the counselors. “All of them are my friends.”

Saturday morning, Brandon--who had visited Jason a week before and brought him a stuffed animal--was among dozens of sleepy, sighted children who arrived at the camp with their parents in vans and station wagons to practice for the Olympics.

The curious campers and timid, sighted children slowly became acquainted with one another. Some of the sighted led the blind by the hand toward the different activities, archery, aquatics and equestrian events among them.

When Brandon and Jason approached each other Saturday, Brandon held his mother’s hand shyly while Jason crawled all over one counselor and slapped high-fives with another.

“I know it’s harder for him to concentrate,” said Brandon, whose softer approach sometimes clashes with Jason’s eagerness.

A counselor pointed Brandon out to Jason and suggested, “Say hi to your buddy.”

Jason said hello in classic Jason style:

“Hi, buddy!” he said to Brandon, lifting him right right off the ground in a rough hug.