The summer of discovering that "normal things for kids can be extraordinary"

Barcelona"I saw a boy staring at the ground, completely focused, and when I asked him what he was looking at, he said, 'There are ants.'" In the summer of 1993, Piarist and educator Enric Canet arrived at the Casal dels Infants in Raval with a broad background in Scouting, but always with middle-class children. There, he encountered boys and girls with different needs than those he had met until then. "They were kids who were very resilient to pain, but they found life outside the city a mountain to be reckoned with," he explains. His work then included such basic tasks as finding sleeping bags for summer camps with minimal conditions: "Twelve or fourteen teenagers slept in tents with newspaper as insulation. Some had never left Barcelona. One slept on the street with his father, and another had just arrived." Those first summers at the Casal would mark him forever: "It was a very significant shock. They didn't have the opportunity for recreation or a listening group. They didn't have the materials they needed. Nor any vision of the mountains. Everything seemed very bizarre to them," Canet explains.

The drive of leisure education professionals became evident when the pandemic hit, another of the summers Canet remembers most fondly for all the effort it took to make the activities go ahead. They organized to attend the Tavascan camps, which were held outdoors, in three batches and with all the necessary safety measures. The complexity was extreme: they had to have separate cooking and cleaning supplies, portable toilets, temperature checks, and masks; but they managed to get around 100 teenagers out of the house. For this reason, she believes that "the big things are the little things," because "these things that seem normal, like climbing a mountain, seeing horses, or seeing stars at night, are extraordinary for kids." Canet insists on highlighting the admiration for children's gaze toward the unheard of, a vision that is especially awakened during the summer and with the leisure activities that take children out of their surroundings and "see another possible world." He has many anecdotes about children discovering that "the sea is salty" or that "the sky has freckles."

About to turn 68 and retired, Canet continues to set up tents or organize food for the summer camps. He does it because "it's worth it" and because he feels "a moral duty to the young people and the people who dedicate their time to him." "You don't do these things for pleasure, but because you believe they transform the world," he adds.