Pauza Magazine Fall 2005 | Page 10

Camp GLOW - Girls Leading Our World Giving you a blow-by-blow report is going to have you yawning before you get to the second paragraph, so let’s jump right into the middle. They don’t call Wednesdays “Hump Day” for nothing, and Camp GLOW was no exception. Each counselor and their team were responsible for all the sessions for one day of the week, and Wednesday was my group’s day. The first official full day for the girls was Monday beginning at 8:15 a.m. and ending at 10:00 p.m. with lights out at 11:00. By 3:00 in the afternoon, I was feeling a bit antsy to say the least and wondered how five more days of this was going to play out. However, the girls, for the most part, were glued to the presenters. Perhaps it is an “age” thing. No, we weren’t camping in a tent at Camp GLOW, but instead we were sharing a room with three giggly girls. There were 145 stairs between the conference room and our sleeping room and as much as I hated the up and down about 5 times a day, it was actually a good thing because it was just about all the exercise we got… unless you were one of the volunteers-in-training for the marathon and you were out at some awful hour before the roosters crowed. The daily topics ranged from Communication and Self, Non-Violent Communication, Environment, Tolerance and Appreciation, Civil Service and my group’s day was Woman’s Health (yawn). Woman’s Health included: Mental Health, Diet, Addiction, Sex Ed, Love/Commitment, etc. Katica, Rachel, our beloved MAK 8 who is staying on for another year, and I decided that if we were going to have a chance at a decent day (remember, it VOLUME 3 ISSUE 2 is “hump day” and the tiredness has set in), we needed to be creative. We started it off by taking a short hike to a park-like area – to get the heck out of that conference room with no window! That was well received. Katica, from Ko?ani, with her masters in Psychology, started by presenting the Mental Health session. She lectured, asked a lot of questions, and opened up discus- by Rachel, which should have never been followed by lunch (please, don’t ask about the food), but was full of lots of great information and hopefully some of it will stick. After lunch, I’m on for the duration with three sessions back to back. I thought, “How can I get and keep their attention?” Picture this, 60 girl campers aged 15 - 16 plus five counselors who are mostly 18 – 20, two in their mid 20’s and 2 or 3 in 30’s and then me the “stara PCV.” We have Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Albanians, Roma, Macedonians, and a handful of Americans with a mix of religions, of course. They are tired and would rather, by this point, be either sleeping or doing “girl things.” I introduced my sessions, “I know the afternoons can get long for all of us,” …a moan from the girls… sion. When it was almost time for the session to end, we asked each girl to choose a tree to tell her problems to, to yell, sc ream, cry or whisper…whatever they wanted to do. Obviously, or maybe not obviously if you aren’t from California, the goal was for them to learn how to de-stress, because having open discussions about personal problems are taboo in Macedonia; this causes stress with nowhere to put it. The girls were a bit timid, so I grabbed a tree of my own and went for it. I was screaming at the top of my lungs (something about a man who had done me wrong), and soon the rest followed. It was really fun and the girls were energized. The PCV’s had a great laugh too. Next came healthy diet presented “but I promise you’ll be attentive because we are going to be talking about things that you may not get much opportunity to discuss, and those topics are: Drugs, Sex, and Rock and Roll!” This definitely got their attention, now I just had to deliver. To begin, Drugs = Addiction, and the most common addiction in Macedonia is smoking, so that was the topic of the hour. Briefly, I found some information about the brain functioning with nicotine and it helped the girls to understand why not starting is smarter than trying to stop, because stopping is so much more difficult once the brain as been altered by the drug. Page 10