welcome to the village

Camps GLOW and BE

Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) was started in Romania in 1995, and has since been implemented in many other countries in which PCVs serve.  The purpose of the camp is to encourage women to become active citizens by building their self esteem and confidence, increasing their self-awareness, and developing their skills in goal setting, assertiveness, health, and career and life planning.  Camp GLOW has been successfully hosted in Rwanda for the past two years, and has provided an ideal way to offer adolescent girls self-development opportunities in a fun and friendly atmosphere.

Camp BE (Boys Excelling) is GLOW’s little brother, and extends similar opportunities to boys, provided in a similar format- for whatever reason, Peace Corps did not want to call the camp “BLOW”.  My region is planning to host one of each of these camps during the extended holiday following third term.  Initially we were hoping to run a single, coeducational camp and split the campers into same-sex groups for specific activities that might be uncomfortable in the big group, but Kerianne, my region’s only health volunteer, informed us that the Peace Corps was not going to approve of such a plan- we subsequently decided on running two camps, back to back.

This meeting was intended to be an opportunity for us to choose- or be delegated- specific tasks for planning the camp.  We had some specific ideas in mind (for instance, due to the hearty endorsement of my site by Genevieve and Joel, we were hoping to have GLOW and BE take place at my school), but needed to take care of some preliminary business like writing the grant proposal, discussing the idea with my headmaster, and figuring out what sort of events we wanted to do at these camps.

The meeting lasted a while, but by the end of it most of us had volunteered for- or been assigned- at least one role, even my friend Kay who wasn’t actually a member of our region.  Since her region wasn’t planning a camp, she had asked if she could help with ours, and we were lucky to have the assistance!  In prior years, Kerianne told us, it had been health volunteers who had done the bulk of planning (largely because the grant proposal needed to be written right as the third term of school was starting, and education volunteers are understandably busy at that point.  Kerianne’s schedule was significantly more open than ours at the moment, so she was happy to take on a daunting amount of the legwork, but we were all going to need to pull our weight for a while if we hoped to actually host a camp this year.  Assignments were handed out, we concluded the meeting, and agreed to meet again in a month.