My two weeks at the Pioneers camp were the last of their kind. The red Pioneer scarf I worked impossibly hard to earn, and which I proudly wore every day to school, would soon turn into a rag with which we wiped the dust off our bookshelves. The stars, medals, and certificates, and the very title of “pioneer,” would soon become museum relics, memories from a different era, fragments of a past life that someone had lived, somewhere.
