People of Sanborn: Kado
Name: Kado Marino Current Role: Big Spring Program Director Tenure at Sanborn: Kado’s first summer was in 2018. He taught as an HTOEC instructor during fall 2019 and joined our team as the BS program director after that. Fun Fact: Kado is not his given name.
What is your first memory at Sanborn? The day Kado arrived, it had been a long day of travel. He’s from upstate New York and it took some effort to make it to Florissant. He remembers dozing off and on throughout his shuttle ride to Colorado Springs, and during one of his awake periods, he received a text from Oliver Fisher, Riding Program Manager at the time, asking Kado if he wanted anything from Chipotle – they would miss lunch at camp due to Kado’s flight time. Kado thinks his burrito would have contained chicken, cilantro lime rice, salsa fresca, and some green things, most likely. He recalls being pretty impressed with that level of care from his first interaction with Sanborn (we know food is important!) and the whole day ended up making him happy.
Favorite cookie? A relatively new addition to the bakery lineup - Kado loves the coffee cookies with coffee icing.
Silliest, most crazy thing you’ve done at camp? One morning for trip announcements in 2018, Kado dressed up as Professor Quirrell from Harry Potter. In the middle of breakfast, he ran into the BS lodge and shouted: “Troll! In the dungeon! Thought you ought to know,” and pretended to faint on the lodge floor. His performance was met with raucous applause from the crowd. All of this was to announce the Harry Potter Overnight - the best part of it all is that it wasn’t even his trip!
Hardest camp trip? Kado remembers his hardest trip being Harvard/Yale. It was the end of second session, so he felt like this trip required him to really give everything that was left in his tank. He’d heard the trip was really difficult and that Yale was hard to summit, so he’d put a lot of effort into planning and doing a lot of prep work before going. In addition, one of his co-counselors on the trip got sick the night before the big Yale climb and had to come off of the trip. Expecting another staff member to come in and take that counselor’s place, Kado woke up the next morning to Mike Adler unzipping his tent nearby - a welcome surprise! With all of the physical and mental difficulty of the trip, Kado reflects that it was easily one of the most rewarding trips he did that summer. His favorite part was that on the way down from Yale, the campers were still so engaged and wanted to be part of finding a route back to their campsite, so Kado was able to give them some autonomy with his navigational guidance.
Favorite camp tradition? In general, Kado just loves that within the span of one day at camp, you are laughing harder than you’ve ever laughed, thinking about something that you’ve never thought so hard about, and challenging yourself all at the same time. At the end of the day, you’re often left with the question: how did all of that happen in one day?
What song would you do at karaoke? Thunderstruck - he’d like to figure out the words better.
