Life at Camp Perry in 1921: A Scrapbook of Gamified Missionary Work at Kilios

Abstract

In 1921, the YMCA out of Constantinople appointed William Jourdan Rapp director of a “Boys’ Camp” at a site near Kilios on the Black Sea. Named Perry, equally for the five values of Personality, Education, Recreation, Religion, and Youth as for James Perry who “gave his life for the advancement of YMCA work in Turkey,” this camp ran a special month-long program designed to create “leaders” who would be able to volunteer at orphans’ camps later in the same summer. With the goal of understanding more about the realities of campers’ lives in Orphans’ Camps and other Work Camps in the “Near East” during the interwar period, this paper looks at Rapp’s personal papers from the years of his YMCA service in the Mediterranean, including extensive reports on and correspondence concerning Camp Perry—as well as a scrapbook and a newspaper jointly put together by the camp staff and the campers themselves.

Keywords

• american ymca
• humanitarian relief
• secular christianity
• william jourdan rapp
• ymca constantinople