Danielia Barron returned home to Old Forge for the holidays following a week-long volunteer educational mission at a church camp on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.

Barron, who currently serves as Director of YMCA Camp Thunderbird’s conference and retreat program in Wiley, SC, along with eleven colleagues, were invited to assist the staff and students of the host church in running the camp.

Barron said she and her colleagues each traveled to Kenya with two pieces of luggage.

One carried their personal belongings, and the other was filled with arts and crafts supplies and sports equipment that would be used for camp activities.

Among the packed items were also gifts for camp participants, including homemade bags filled with toiletries, candy, school supplies, t-shirts and blankets.

Over 70 children, ages 10 and up, were bussed from a huge slum outside the capitol city to participate in the camp, according to Barron.

“Their lives are very different from ours. We’re a super materialistic society, and they are definitely not.”

She noted abuse, neglect, filth, and excessively close quarters (i.e., five people living in a ten-foot by ten-foot pieced-together hut) as examples of the difficult conditions in which the kids lived.

And though she cited that getting to know the kids was the best thing about her experience, she said the hardest part was seeing them go back to such difficult conditions after having worked so closely with them all week long.

Barron spoke of twelve girls, “the Shunem girls,” who had been previously rescued from dire, abusive conditions in the slums.

They were now living in housing at the camp and cared for by house mothers.

Before heading back to the U.S., Barron committed to sending monthly gifts to cover the expenses for two of the girls who were in need of financial support.

The camp owners would like to build a school and a church on the property as resources permit, according to Barron.

She has been invited back and expects she will volunteer there again.

“I’m alright with that,” said Danielia’s mother, Bonnie Baker. “That’s who I raised. I’m just a little nervous she’ll come back and say, ‘Mom, I’m going back to stay.’”

Barron works during the academic year at Camp Thunderbird, which hosts events such as weddings, youth group retreats and many church-sponsored activities.

During the summer, she relocates to Iroquois Spring Camps in Rock Hill, NY, where she started working summers during her undergraduate years.

She serves as a group leader at the camps, supervising 19 counselors and 65 students, and works with children ages 14 and 15.

A 2003 graduate of Town of Webb Schools, Barron earned a bachelor’s degree in Recreation Management at Ithaca College, and just completed her masters in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA.

She intends to earn a PhD at some point, perhaps in education, because she thoroughly enjoys the learning process.

She would like to teach leadership, and to work with students at the teen or college level.

“The best class I’ve taken is called Servant Leadership. It’s all about having a servant heart first, and then choosing to be a leader. It speaks to who I am, which is why I loved it so much.

“I think it’s important to teach people that leadership is not about power, or about being aggressive and telling people what to do. It’s about wanting to serve, and then through serving, being a leader,” she said.