Camp GLOW

Camp GLOW Nekemte 2013 in full force!

“I AM STRONG WOMAN!” – The cry that rang out on the last day of Camp GLOW Nekemte and gave me shivers up my spine to hear it.

Every summer in developing countries around the world, Peace Corps volunteers come together to put on summer  camps for young girls, called Camp GLOW: Girls Leading Our World. Funded by PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), the camps teach girls about health, leadership, gender, volunteerism, and teamwork. This summer in Ethiopia, 12 camps will take place, including our camp in the city of Nekemte.

This year with 15 powerhouse PCVs, 8 Ethiopian adult counterparts, and 6 stellar returning junior counselors, we decided to go all out and bring a total of 66 ninth grade girls as campers from our towns to Nekemte, despite only being required to bring 30. Despite our utter exhaustion at the camp’s conclusion, we couldn’t be more glad we went big, because our camp was “an epic success.”  Humble we may not be, but as director of this year’s Nekemte Camp GLOW, I couldn’t be more proud of our collective efforts to give as many girls as possible the best camp we could.  

The central message of our camp was female leadership, with sessions designed to answer three fundamental questions: what is leadership, why should girls be leaders, and how can they practically demonstrate leadership?  Our sessions included a variety of topics and activities – anatomy, STIs, HIV prevention, gender roles, gender-based violence, intro to volunteerism, mural painting, cooking demo with nutrition lesson, container gardening, resisting peer pressure,  public speaking, and more, if you can believe it – with all roads leading back to leadership. Our goal was to give them a concrete understanding of the variety of ways to be a leader, including being a role model of positive behavior and purposefully pursuing your goals, so that girls can immediately begin  applying leadership even while they’re still students.

To that end, I want to share with you the stories of two girls from Fincha:

First is Chaltu*, who lives with her grandparents and her aunt. Throughout the school year she’s only allowed to leave the house for school, and must remain at home the rest of the time, as is the case for most girls in Ethiopia. In fact, her aunt forbade her to come to the camp until her grandfather stepped in and overruled the decision. Five days into camp we took all the girls on a field trip to visit successful women in Nekemte and hear their stories. Walking with Chaltu back to camp, she told me that she’s always wished she was a boy, because they’re free to go where they like and do what they want, but that because of this week at camp and hearing those successful women speak, she’s realized that it’s good to be a woman. In her words, “woman is the base of everything. Without woman, there is nothing.” She began the week shy and quiet, but by the end of the week she was freely laughing and competitively participating in field day, showing the confidence that is the foundation of leadership.

Stop #1 of the field trip: a grocery store owned by Chaltu's relative

Second is Ayantu*, the daughter of a prominent figure in the county’s education bureau. A naturally reserved and poised young woman, she quickly took the lead in two distinct ways. One was translation. Our camp was conducted in three spoken languages – English, Amharic (Ethiopia’s national language), and Afan Oromo (the regional language) – and Ayantu easily translated our English into either language whenever one of our junior counselors or counterparts wasn’t available. The other involves  our camp’s fourth language : sign language. Our camp was held at the Nekemte School for the Deaf, four of our campers were deaf, and members of the cooking and maintenance staff were also deaf. Ayantu was on the same team as our deaf campers, and she jumped right into learning sign language directly from her teammates. Long before the end of the week she was stringing signs together to make sentences and playing games with them that didn’t require speech, modeling for other campers how to treat them with respect and see them as more than their disability.  

Ayantu using her new sign language skills to communicate with her teammates

I’m very proud of these two Fincha ladies, and there are another 64 stories just like the two I’ve shared. On Saturday during field day, one of the activities was a voice projection exercise, to teach girls to literally find their voices. We asked them to shout at the top of their lungs, “I am a strong woman!,” and even the typically quieter girls held nothing back. When it came time for our closing candle ceremony, all 66 girls were in tears. We asked one of the girls why she was so moved, and she said she never expected to feel like she could be a leader. No one had ever told her it was possible before.

I can hardly express how inspiring and rewarding it was to see the girls embrace the possibility that they could be  female leaders and just GLOW with the knowledge that if nothing else, they can be the leaders of their own lives. Ladies and gentlemen, this is why I joined the Peace Corps!

 

Me and my team of monkeys!

*Name has been changed