By 5:45, the camp woke up. Before the sun had risen, people poured café lattes and demolished bunches of bananas before wriggling into wetsuits and hauling pastel surfboards into vans. As I watched this structured chaos from a sofa in the café, it hit me that this was no usual holiday — and certainly no usual work trip. At this surf camp, people flew in from as near as Singapore and as far as Moscow to learn to ride the waves and find community with total strangers . This fall, I spent five