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.
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