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For most of the year, it’s all about cancer. At Camp Okizu, it’s all about just being a kid.

How do you help children with cancer forget all the doctors and treatments and pain for a week? Where can they swim and play, smiling ear to ear beneath adorably bald heads? Who manages to make the topic of childhood cancer positively uplifting? Two words: Camp Okizu—a camp for children with cancer, and their siblings and parents.

"It’s hard to explain," says Danny Thompson, 16, who was diagnosed with leukemia at age three and has attended the camp each year since he was six. “It’s like another world. Everything is just perfect. You get away from everything.”

“The camp offers something to those kids that most of us can’t understand,” says Danny’s mom, Patty Thompson of San Rafael. “Every year he gets something new out of it.”

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