February 20, 2012
Camp GLOW: Girls Leading Our World
Last week we (8-10 PCV’s) hosted a Camp GLOW in HoHoe from Monday to Friday. 8 local PCV’s brought junior high and senior high girls from our villages to the camp. We had 20 jhs girls and 7 shs group leaders. I brought 3 girls from my village and my “daughter” from Likpe Bala.
We started planning this camp back in October and had originally planned on having it in January. Thanks to the slow motion of bureaucracy, our grant was not funded in time and we had to reschedule it for February. Every aspect of the camp is planned, organized and executed by us PCV’s …and I think we did a fantastic job! Just sayin’.
Monday we all arrived. We held our camp at the Boy Scout Camp that has been developed in HoHoe by some British lady…so we had actual tents! And a meeting hall, 2 outside bamboo shower stalls, and 2 actual toilets. The girls were excited to stay in the tents, because they never had been in one before. I told them that in the U.S. I do this for fun on the weekends. Most of us PCV’s slept on mats in the meeting hall. Once we all arrived we split the girls off into families and a senior high girl headed each family. We spent the first afternoon doing icebreakers and getting the girls comfortable with talking in front of everyone. Many of the young girls in Ghana are shy and quiet…a goal of this camp is to make them bold and self-confident. We had the girls decorate name cards that we would later use in our AWESOME STOP MOTION VIDEO. One of the PCV’s is a stop motion fanatic and had decided to make a video of the camp and it turned out great!!! We had our dinner and then played the Lion King on the projector for an evening activity. At 9 pm the girls are sent to their tents. Us PCV’s stayed up late filling water barrels as the water was out all day and when you have 40 people bucket bathing, water goes fast! The water came back on around 10pm and we finally got to bed around 11:30.
Next morning the girls are awake by 4:30 am, knocking on the door to get buckets for bathing…oh good Lord this is gonna be a long week. We are up before the sun each day L Today is leadership day. We have lectures on leadership skills and activities to facilitate that. Also, we started taking pictures of the girls for the stop motion video.
So I played photographer and Dallin and I spent about an hour getting each girl to come with her self-decorated nametag and take about 5 pics in succession, so that in the video it would look like the nametag was moving. I HAD SO MUCH FUN!!! Getting the girls to be silly and let go; Ghanaians don’t smile for pictures very much and if you get them to, they usually looked strained or slightly retarded (seriously), so I had a great time acting like a goofball making the girls actually laugh and be naturally silly. This was probably my favorite part of the camp…we all had fun.
Next, Promise, a local women comes in to talk to the girls about teen pregnancy and how to become confident in yourself and make good decisions for your life. One topic that came up and started a long, heated discussion was sex with teachers for grades, or sleeping with a man for money for school fees. This is very common here in Ghana and not necessarily looked down on by the families or communities. It’s a very sad situation; girls want to go to school to be smart and take care of themselves and succeed in life, but the families will give the small money they have to the sons to go to school, but not the daughters. The girls can sleep with men or teachers in order to pay their school fees…this is not seen as prostitution. But condom use is not widely practiced…so while you’re sleeping with your teacher to continue your education, you get pregnant and still have to drop out of school and get stuck living in the village as a farmer and wife. What do you do? It was very hard hearing these girls talk; either from personal experience or from things they’ve seen…what can I do?
After lunch, Daniel had us do team-building, leadership skill games with the girls 1) Mine field (one girl has to verbally guide her blindfolded sisters through a mine field), 2) the trust fall, 3) while blindfolded and without speaking arrange yourselves in order of the number you were given, 4) with rocks and sticks, creatively draw/write something to describe your group, 5) move your team across the “river” on the stones. We all had a lot of fun with these and it does make the girls work together in ways they are not used to working…creatively…the Ghana Education Service does not encourage creative thought.
Next, we had craft time. Since today is Valentine’s Day, one station makes construction paper heart pouches, one station makes Valentine’s/love letters, and another station paints a Valentine’s Day banner. The last station is where I teach the girls to make watersachet purses by hand. This evening we have a bonfire complete with marshmallows brought back from America. We had the girls out gathering good roasting sticks and I was trying to explain to them that we would put an American candy on the end and then set it on fire and eat it on biscuits (cookies)…they were not completely sold on the idea. So after dark we started the fire; I had brought my drum and one of the girls was a good drummer; so we all drummed and danced and sang. Next came the mallows! The girls loved them!! They kept asking what they were called and what the S’more sandwich was called. We had a great time!
Wednesday was a super busy day. We started with the HIV education. We had different stations for the girls to go to and discuss topics presented to them. One station’s scenario was that your friend, who likes to wear short skirts and make up, is raped. The girls were all saying that it was the girl’s fault, she shouldn’t have been wearing clothes that tempted the boys; the boys cannot control themselves. This was another very difficult discussion for the group. We as Americans are always taught that it is NEVER the woman’s fault in a rape. We discussed the topic for a long time with the girls and at one point one of our male PCV’s stood up and said, “Girls, I am a boy and I can tell you that men CAN control themselves. If these boys and men are telling you it is your fault that they cannot control themselves and they can touch you and force you into sex, THEY ARE LYING TO YOU! No two ways about it! LYING!” I told them the slogan, “THIS IS MINE” pointing to my body. My choice, for me to decide…no one else. Always remember “THIS IS MINE.”
After this discussion we had a midwife and nurse come in to talk to the girls about health and how our bodies change around the time of JHS and so on. It was a good discussion. Next we did my scavenger hunt. The girls had to think creatively to follow the clues I made each team. Once they figured out the clue, they would find the hidden card and then perform the activity on it before receiving their next clue. Examples of activities: Name your best friend and say what you like best about that person; who taught you how to cook and as a group discuss how to make azi detsi; tell one of your dreams and discuss how to achieve it; what qualities do you look for in a boy to date; name a leader in your community and discuss what qualities make them a good leader; what woman do you most look up to and why, etc.
After this we did the activities from the Journey of Hope kit (what PC provides us for HIV education…this camp is funded with HIV prevention funds…can you tell?) Daniel is giving us our station assignments, “Jeanna, I’m gonna have you do the condom demonstrations. You’d be good at that.” “What does that mean??” So I got to bust out the wooden penises and show a bunch of 12-18 year olds how to put on a condom properly. A question I got a couple of times, “ Madam Jeanna, do the boys put it on and take it off, or do we?” “Well usually the boy does it, but some boys don’t know how to use them properly. Now you know how to, so you can make sure it is done correctly so you can remain safe.” “We young people are shy to go and buy condoms. Is there a way to get them without anyone seeing us?” “If you are not bold enough to buy condoms to keep yourself healthy, then you are not grown enough to be having sex. Does that make sense?”
Next activity… Daniel put together a team relay of 5 stations where the girls had to run with their team while holding hands and complete different tasks/quizzes about the HIV stuff we learned earlier in the day. It was a lot of fun!! After such an active day we had crafts after dinner until bedtime.
Thursday, final day. As the week went on we all were getting tired…not enough sound sleep (2 inch foam mat on concrete sucks after a couple days). So today we took the girls to Francis College for ICT lab; David is a PCV who teaches ICT at the school so he got us hooked up with the lab. After ICT, we had Grace (the training manager at PC in Accra…awesome, strong Ghanaian woman) come and speak to the girls. She talked to them about working hard yourself to reach your goals. She told her personal story how her family would not pay for her as a girl to continue her education; but she had a dream of getting a master’s degree. Her family kept trying to marry her off, but she kept working hard (selling wood, processing soya) so she could continue. She put herself through Agriculture school and then worked for 6 years so she could go back to university and then later on to achieve her master’s degree. She had children and a husband once she got out of Agric school, but she worked hard and told her husband “this is what I want” and he did not stand in her way as she continued her school. Now the families in her village are sending their girls to school, because they see that Grace achieved great things and now has money. She is sponsoring other children with their school fees and has the money to send an in-home doctor to care for her elderly father who has a disease. Her small village saw what one woman could do and now they are starting to support their young girls. I LOVE GRACE...she is a good storyteller. I pointed out to the girls that all 3 women who came to speak to them this week all did small jobs to save money for their own education. They did not rely solely on their parents or on men for money…they did it on their own…it was long and hard, but they achieved it for themselves…and look at them, they are women to admire. Knowing you can do for yourself will give you the courage to accomplish anything.
After Grace left we did another art project. We had a screen print made with a HoHoe Camp GLOW logo a PCV designed, and we showed the girls how to screen print their own t-shirts…they really loved this. After the shirts, we had sessions on leadership skills and then let the girls have free time to work on their acts for the Talent Show that night. So the talent show…Ghanaians love drama/acting/skits. And these girls were great!! They came up with all the content on their own…which meant a few cuss words, girls strutting around acting like typical Ghanaian boys, pregnancy, “RAW sex” (sex without condom) (all the PCV’s kept praying by the end of this very long and slightly raunchy skit there was a lesson to be learned (finally it was…she got pregnant from having raw sex for money for school)). There was singing and dancing. As our part of the talent show, the PCV’s did the “cha cha” song/dance and had the girls jump in at the end…they love seeing us look stupid.
The next morning we did a certificate ceremony, final words of encouragement, and watched our stop motion video of camp. The girls left by 10, we finished cleaning up and then went and drank some well deserved beer :) The heavens opened up Friday afternoon for the first real rain since October…we got out of those tents just in time :)
This camp was a ton of work and had really long days where we had to be super energetic the whole time…this is hard for people who spend a large portion of their time alone. But this is definitely one of my favorite things I’ve done while in Peace Corps. It was awesome to watch the girls show up on Monday all shy and timid (well most of them, there are always a couple sasses) and see them get more and more comfortable throughout the week, and then outgoing, actually debating with each other and with us, laughing, asking thought-provoking questions, and working together on so many levels. Maybe I’m just a proud camp mama, but the HoHoe GLOW Camp f’n rocked!!!!!
j
