Sunday, August 13, 2006

Lice

I never had headlice. Until my younger siblings went to school, caught it from their unclean classmates, and shared with me. Nice.

However, headlice has always been an assumed part of school, like report cards and packed lunches. No big deal.

Not so for the kids (and some counselors) who attend KSA. Some parents need to buy their kids a clue with all that money. Do without the Juicy sweats, buy a clue. Seriously. Your counselor will thank you.

Some kid bought lice to camp courtesy of a party the week before. KSA does not have a policy of checking kids' hair on arrival, although I understand some camps do. This kid in turn gave it to her whole bunk, which sparked off a huge spate of girls wanting their hair checked. And once one kid in a bunk had it, they had to treat everyone else in the bunk.

Despite us telling them not to go til tomorrow, half our girls went down, for some reason got checked (I would have told them to turn around and march right back up the hill), of course were diagnosed with lice, and told they would have to be treated. So I took the rest of the girls down - no way was I going to have a spate of reinfections going around and around the bunk - we got tested (after a bit of a fight), dignosed, and treated.

The hysterics of some of these girls. Honestly. It's just shampoo girls, really. Wash your hair, take two Valiums, and call me in the morning.
And don't even get me started on the Jewish hair on some of these girls. Lucky I actually like brushing people's hair. Too bad no-one offered to do mine.

Here's Sylvie doing hers when she got back from her day off:

The one thing that really annoyed me was the attitude of some people who either hadn't been checked yet, or who had been pronouned clean by the stellar health staff. There was a very obvious crowd of girls walking around with recently-washed hair / bikinis on / lack of trendy clothes on and these people were treated like lepers. It was extremely irritating, not least because hello, I've been treated, therefore all the nits are dead. Look at you, dirty, unwashed ... Well, you get the picture.

The lice gods smiled on me though, and the second check forced all the non-believers into smelly-shampoo territory also. Yay.

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