Every year Tzu Chi's American chapters send young volunteers to a four-day leadership camp. This year's was held at the foundation's Northern California Branch from August 6 to 9, and most of the people teaching the classes were barely older than the people taking them.

The camp is how Tzu Chings (Tzu Chi Collegiate Association with chapters in various universities) train the students who will run them next. Participants came from campuses across the country and from very different backgrounds. Some had grown up in Tzu Shao (high school volunteers); others met Tzu Chi at university; a few had never been to a camp before.

The curriculum starts with the foundation's own history. Tzu Ching leaders acted out the Bamboo Bank Era, then set participants to work in groups making posters on Tzu Chi's four missions: charity, medicine, education, and humanistic culture.

The rest of the four days moved between quiet crafts and physical work. In calligraphy, instructor Hung-Kai Tsai (蔡宏凱) began with how to hold the brush, and asked participants to notice that a scattered mind shows up as a scattered line. "One stroke, one heart," he called it. In the tea ceremony, they washed their hands, learned how to offer a cup, and served each other.

Flower arranging taught the same lesson with stems instead of words. No flower in an arrangement is there to be looked at on its own; each has a different height, color and job, and the arrangement holds only because they carry one another. A team works the same way, the instructor said.

They also assembled Tzu Chi's multi-purpose folding beds, tables and privacy partition tents, all made from recycled plastic, and learned why relief supplies have to be light, durable and reusable. Staff closed the session with a fashion show of clothing made from recycled PET bottles.

On the third morning, the camp went to Our City Forest, a San Jose nonprofit that plants and maintains urban trees. Participants spent hours in the sun caring for saplings, pulling weeds, laying cardboard and spreading wood chips.

Andrew Lin, a Berkeley junior, said the camp had given him good vegetarian food, a lot of people worth knowing, and talks he was glad to have heard.

Two participants described meeting Master De Ting (德庭法師), the monastic who answered their questions on the last day. I Chung (鍾薏) of Sacramento is about to start her first year at the University of California, Berkeley. She had met him once before, that summer in Taiwan, and arrived nervous. He told the group to relax. She ended up asking him light-hearted questions, and said afterwards that not every question has to be profound, and that a humorous, sincere one often closes the distance faster.

I-Ju Wu (巫宜儒) is entering her third year at UC Merced. She grew up in Tzu Chi, attending the Tzu Chi Chinese Academy in Cupertino and then volunteered as a Tzu Shao, but her university has no Tzu Ching chapter, so she came to the camp to stay connected. She asked nothing and listened throughout. The Master, she said, drew on examples from young people's own lives.

Eunice Tham (譚佳薇), who moved from Malaysia to Detroit, was certified as a volunteer in 2019. She said Malaysian volunteers had looked after her when she was starting out, and that Master Cheng Yen, still working at nearly ninety, is why she stays motivated.

The camp closed with an evening of student performances, and the volunteers went back to their campuses to run next year's chapters. Most of the work had been done by people in their twenties: they wrote the curriculum, met the flights, cooked the meals and then stood in front of the room.

Written by Ruo-Li Huang (黃若莉), Vivian Chang (張曉寧), Karen Hsiang (項才容), Jean Hsu (許維真)