Camp GLOW...Continued.

I’ll give the writing part a try now. I just needed some time to process. Okay, Camp GLOW.

Through our spectacular friends and families contributions (another volunteer and I did the fundraising for the camp), we were able to invite 30 girls (ages 13-18) along with 8 counselors on a 6 day adventure, leadership and girls empowerment camp teaching about healthy relationships, self-esteem, sexual health and reproduction and HIV/AIDS (which continues to devastate communities here in South Africa). After separating the girls into cabins (the purple, pink, blue and green cabins which were fantastically led by four Peace Corps Volunteer counselors) we had the girls play games, learn camp songs, write in journals, swim in the river, hike in the mountains, perform in a talent show, sign each other’s GLOW GIRLS ROCK T-shirts, dance, do some yoga (!), learn how to kickbox, make smores, and say goodbye to the things they were told they couldn’t do in an “I can’t” funeral around the campfire. And these were just some of the activities we did!  It was a crazy, awesome, challenging, inspiring, fantastic week. One that I will never forget.
For most of these girls it was the first time they had left home for any reason other than a family gathering in a nearby village. They were exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking, new friends and opened up in ways I never imagined. Their bravery and honesty was inspiring. When my fellow Peace Corps volunteer and I started planning this camp, we had high hopes that it might make a small difference in changing these young girls behavior. But I believe we did more – at least I hope we did. During my first year in South Africa, I was talking to a young girl about circumstances and the idea that sometimes you aren’t given a choice in your life. If you live in a village or a city. If you have two loving parents or you live alone and have no parents. If you are poor or rich. The girls that attended camp didn’t choose their circumstances. But they have the ability to make choices that could change the course of their future. Most of them had never been told this before...and that’s what I hope we did during this camp.

Who knows?! We may even have sparked a change big enough that now we will see a future president among these girls? Anything is possible. The choice is all theirs…