Aye, it’s pirate for a week

For a week this summer, 11-year-old Rene Melendez has decided to put his neurosurgery books away and become a pirate instead.

Rene will go to Camp Whittier in Los Padres National Forest in Santa Barbara for the Avast Ye Campers pirate-themed camp, where he will go treasure hunting, sing campfire songs and wear pirate clothes.

However, getting the opportunity to go to camp didn’t come easily for Rene, whose main interest last year was getting into trouble.

Failing school, fighting and getting suspended, Rene was on a downward spiral headed toward a grim future, with his behavior stemming from his parents’ divorce eight years ago.

“It was hard for him to go through the divorce,” his mother, Carmen Rodriguez, said. “He’s been carrying all this anger for a long time.”

Not wanting her son to end up as a domestic worker, which is common in her low-income Reseda neighborhood, Rodriguez, a full-time nanny, decided to snap Rene out of the bad behavior he had developed. She began waking him at 6:30 a.m. every day to wash dishes, clean the house and mow the lawn.

“I was basically the maid of the house for a whole month,” Rene said. “But I learned that if I’m bad, I won’t have a career as an adult. . . . I’ll be doing hard work that doesn’t pay a lot of money.”

Now a straight-A student who has competed in the Academic Pentathlon and reads medical books in his spare time, Rene dreams of going to UCLA to become a neurosurgeon like his inspiration, Benjamin Carson, the first doctor to separate twins conjoined at the head.

As a reward for his complete turnaround, Rene was one of 80 children chosen by the community-based organization Keep Youth Doing Something (KYDS) to go to camp this summer.

While at Camp Whittier, kids get the chance to do things they normally couldn’t, said Julie Brown, the community development manager of KYDS. “It takes them out of their environment and gives them a chance to go away to this beautiful space bound by nature that’s completely different from city life,” she said.

With $1.8 million raised last year by the Los Angeles Times Summer Camp Campaign, approximately 8,000 children will go to camp in Southern California this summer.

The Summer Camp Campaign is part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund, a McCormick Foundation Fund, which matches all donations at 50 cents on the dollar.

Donations are tax-deductible as permitted by law. Addresses will not be released or published.

For more information, call (800) LA TIMES, Ext. 75771, or e-mail familyfund@latimes .com.

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juliette.funes@latimes.com