Even before I became a Peace Corps volunteer, I had heard
about and seen pictures of volunteers conducting GLOW camps. Along with world
map painting, it’s a PC project that has reverberated throughout all the countries
in which Peace Corps places volunteers, from Albania to Zambia. GLOW (yet
another Peace Corps acronym) stands for “Girls Leading Our World”, and is a
PC-designed secondary project that creates a temporary summer camp, usually
about a week long, for volunteers to bring girls from their communities to
spend time learning about a variety of subjects, but above all, to have fun,
build confidence, and learn that there their lives have more potential than
just being a mother and a housewife.
It’s been said, most notably by Nicholas Kristof, that a
country’s level of development can often be gauged by looking at the status of
its women. So it’s no wonder that for nearly every country that Peace Corps
serves in (and which is therefore identified as ‘developing’), the majority of female
citizens do not enjoy a high level of opportunity. In Madagascar, for example,
the traditional gender role of a woman as a
childbearer/childcarer/cook/homekeeper is still very much alive. Far too many
girls get pregnant before they finish lycee
(high school), and then they drop out to have the baby and get married, and
their life falls into the pattern that has persisted for centuries. And then
far too often, that woman’s daughter will grow up, and perhaps the family doesn’t
have enough money to send her to high school (only the brother), so she gets
pregnant and the cycle repeats itself all over again. So part of the goal of
GLOW camps is to at least show girls that their lives are worth just as much as
men’s; that they are important, they are strong, they are intelligent, and that
they can make choices that will help them have the life that they want.
I’d known that I’d wanted to participate in a camp for some
time, and one reason was that I don’t feel like I have very much opportunity to
work with kids in my town, since my work is either office-based, or field-based
working with farmers. More than anything, I just really wanted to do something
for the girls in my town. So I joined up with 6 other volunteers from 4 other
towns in the Sud Est to hold a GLOW camp in August. We started working on it in
early spring, with Teena (a third year extension volunteer in Mananjary with
previous GLOW camp experience) taking the lead to write the proposal to receive
the grant money from USAID. Each town was allowed to bring 4 campers, chosen
from the quatrieme (about 7th-8th
grade) level of CEG (middle school). We decided to hold the camp in Mananjary,
the northernmost town in the Sud Est region [it’s technically in the
Vatovavy-Fitovinany region, but for Peace Corps purposes we group it together
with the Sud Est region], which is a beautiful smaller city right on the ocean
with tons of great seafood and a laid-back feel. In June I held an essay
contest to choose the girls, and I worked with my counterpart Francia to choose
the four best entries. So then on Saturday August 17th, Francia and
I, along with our four campers Sonia, Jemicine, Emeren, and Angelina, rolled
out of Vangaindrano to start the weeklong adventure.
The first day proved to be difficult and stressful even
before we got to the camp. Jeremy, the volunteer north of me in Farafangana,
and I had rented a private taxi-brousse
to take us and the girls to Mananjary, otherwise we’d never be able to get
there in one day. We’d reserved it in advance, revisited the brousse office
multiple times to confirm, and paid half of the amount up front. But when we
stopped by the brousse company office in Fara that day to doublecheck that we
were all set to have them drive us home on the 23rd, they claimed
that we told them we were leaving on the 21st, and were about to
refuse to drive us. They insisted that this was not a normal route for them and
that they had to obtain a special permit, and that there was no way their
drivers could wait for us for the whole week. Although infinitely frustrating,
this situation proved to be a good exercise for the type of problem-solving
that I’ve had to perfect in the Peace Corps. When you work in a country like
Madagascar, many, many things go wrong, and in fact few things go according to
plan. When this happens you can either wring your hands and complain about it,
or you can stop, breathe, and say “ok, this is messed up, so how do we work
around it?” For this scenario, both Jeremy and I knew the company was
lying—we’d never ever mentioned leaving on the 21st, and we assumed
that they’d made a mistake and were just trying to blame us to cover their asses—so
I knew it wouldn’t do any good to quarrel with them. At that point there were
about 6 people arguing—the driver, the brousse office worker, our 2 chaperones,
and then Jeremy and myself. I took a deep breath, interjected, and calmly and
quietly said to the woman, “ok, we know there was a mistake, but we still need
to get to Mananjary. What can we do to make this happen?” That changed the tone
of the conversation from an argument to a discussion on how to work together,
and after many phone calls to Teena to figure out logistics, we worked out that
we could use this brousse company for our intra-camp travel to and from
Ranomafana. And so an hour later, we were finally back on the road. Although
this was definitely not something that I wanted to be dealing with on the first
day, I was proud of how I handled the situation, and that I was able to work
through the argument in Malagasy, in the baking sun in the middle of a crowded taxi-brousse station, with 8 teenage
girls impatiently waiting for us.
After picking up another PCV, Nick, and his campers in
Ambalona, we finally arrived in Mananjary just as the sun was going down. We
set the girls up participating in a series of icebreaker games to get to know
each other, and the rest of us got to work helping to get dinner ready, because
we’d been tossed another challenge: the cook we’d hired did not show up with
the helper she’d promised to bring, and so she was trying to cook for 35 people
alone. We finally managed to get dinner on the table—spaghetti with meat
sauce—and learned our first lesson of the camp: if you’re bringing girls to an
unfamiliar place, it’s best to at least give them familiar food. This dinner
was too American for many of them, and that combined with my heavy-handed
portions (I’m a Jewish mother even though I’m not yet a mother) meant that
there was plenty of uneaten pasta on their plates at the end. But no matter, we
had Nick and Jeremy, with their superhuman male PCV metabolisms, volunteer to finish
it off. After we announced this to the
girls, Nick and Jeremy soon found themselves being delivered plate after plate
of half-eaten pasta. And to their credit, they finished nearly all of it.
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| Nick and Jeremy, the pasta champs. |
After announcing the chores chart (some girls were on dish
duty, while others were on cleaning and water duty), we set up the sleeping
area for the girls in one of the classrooms of the CEG where they camp was
being held. How do you make a sleeping area in a classroom? You MacGyver it by
rigging up mosquito nets onto stacked desks, and place straw mats underneath
each one. Credit goes to Jeremy and Nick for coming up with this plan.
My chief responsibilities for the camp were to conduct one
session for the campers, and also to work with Jeremy to handle all things
water and sanitation. This meant filling up the water filters, and keeping a
constantly-stocked handwashing station for the girls to use before every meal
(and thereby reinforcing the lesson that Teena taught during her health and
hygiene session.) For my actual session, I decided that I wanted to teach
something about money and budgeting, since I am a business volunteer. One of
the main problems that I see here is that people are not used to saving money,
and don’t often think long-term when it comes to planned or unplanned expenses.
So this creates a problem in my area especially, when clove farmers receive a
sudden windfall from their yearly harvest, and are so overwhelmed by finally
having money that they spend it on things like a TV, or clothes, or alcohol,
without considering that they should be saving it for the lean times. To teach
this, I designed a game that was essentially a very scaled-down version of
Monopoly: each girl pretended that she was 30 years old, working in an office,
and was married with one school age child. After starting off with giving each
girl a small amount of money as ‘savings’ to start, we then went around in a
circle, and for each turn, the girl received a ‘weekly’ salary, but had to
‘spend’ (i.e. give back to me) 2/3 of it for essentials such as food, phone
credit, and charcoal for cooking. Next she had the option to buy a ‘want’
item—such as new clothes, a vacation, a TV, a fancy phone, etc. But then at the
end, she had to pick a card that listed a scenario in which she would have to
spend money, such as buying medicine, or needing to pay for home repairs, and if
she didn’t have enough money for that, she’d be out of the game. The goal was
to try and teach the girls that they have to be prepared for unforeseen
expenses, and even if they may technically have the money to buy a luxury item
such as a TV, they need to plan for the future and make sure they have money
set aside for the inevitable things in life that cost money.
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| Working with Ode to prepare my session. (Note: Sonia, one of my campers, had braided my hair the day before the camp. It was beautifully done and very intricate, but I look pretty awful in braids. To be considerate, I kept the braids in for a few days but I wore it half-covered with a scarf .) |
Mine was one of the first sessions of the camp, and I was
really nervous for how it was going to go. I spent some time preparing for it
with my counterpart Francia, and Jeremy’s counterpart Ode, who is fluent in
English, helped me translate some key concepts that were tricky to express in
Malagasy. Thanks to their help, the session went well, and the girls had fun
pretending to ‘spend’ money and be able to ‘buy’ things. Although none of them
took the bait and bought the big-ticket items like a motorcycle, the act of
taking away part of their (fake) money each turn to pay for something mundane
(but essential) like taxi-brousse
frais or a gift for a family member’s wedding reinforced the concept that life
costs money, and so you have to be prepared for it by planning and saving
wisely.
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| Me during my session, with my co-worker Francia to my right. |
That night it was my turn in the rotation to sleep in the
CEG with the girls and the chaperones, so I bunked down with another volunteer
amidst the twittering and chattering of 20 pre-teen/teenage girls. Needless to
say, I didn’t get a lot of sleep, especially because we had a very early
morning wake-up call the next day: we were heading to Ranomafana! Ranomafana is
a beautiful national park and eco-tourist attraction about a 4 hour drive inland
from Mananjary. It’s one of Madagascar’s conservation success stories, and is a
living, breathing example of how when tourism is developed responsibly, income
generation and wildlife conservation can go hand in hand. The girls were really
excited to visit (a first time for most of them), and so after loading up in
the
taxi-brousses, we made our way
through the twisting rainforest roads. Our first stop in Ranomafana was the
arboretum, which is where my fellow Peace Corps volunteer Jesse works. Jesse
met us there and helped with our programming for the girls, which included a
nutrition session (conducted by Nick) and an arboretum scavenger hunt to help
the girls learn about the different types of plants and trees in Madagascar.
Then we headed to the CEG, which Jesse had helped arrange as a place for us to
sleep and eat for the 2 nights of our visit.
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| The group at the Ranomafana arboretum. |
The next day, we were scheduled to take a guided hike of the
rainforest (and hopefully get to spot lots of lemurs and chameleons), but we
woke up to a drizzly, gray day, so we postponed the hike to the afternoon, and
instead started the day at the Centre ValBio, which is a beautiful research
facility and is Jesse’s other workplace. The girls did a session on study
skills with Jeremy and Ode, and then they got to enjoy a special treat enjoyed
by Jesse: some time to play around with laptop computers. Most of these girls
have never really even seen a computer, let alone been able to use one, so this
was a new and exciting experience. The computers were One Laptop Per Child
laptops, also known as the $100 laptop, and are very durable and easy to use;
Jesse had secured them from a Canadian NGO last year for use in his town. They
have a proprietary operating system which is designed to be intuitive for kids,
and sure enough, the girls picked up how to use them in a heartbeat, and were
quickly drawing pictures, taking photos, typing messages, and even playing
around with the computer-to-computer chat. They all had a blast and hated to
leave, but we had to get them back for lunch. After lunch, we piled back into
the buses and drove up the mountain to the park entrance for our forest hike.
Although the animals are more active in the mornings, we nevertheless did get
to see some bamboo lemurs, which was the first time I’d seen that type of
lemur, and perhaps the first time ever seeing a lemur for many of the girls.
Our park tour guide was excellent, and you could sense his pride in showing
these girls the forest. One of the most poignant things he said was when he
talked about how foreign tourists spend thousands of dollars to come here to
see the wildlife, and so the girls should feel proud to be Malagasy and call
this country home.
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| Me showing some of the girls how to use a laptop. Pardon my tired, haggard appearance... it was a sleepless week. |
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| I love the look of pure joy on Sonia's face here. |
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| And Emeren's face of happiness, too! |
The next day, we gave the girls the option to stay in town and
visit the natural hot water pool in town (Ranomafana means “hot water”, and is
so named after the local hot springs), or to go back to Mananjary and visit the
beach. About ¾ of the girls preferred to visit the hot springs, so I stayed
behind with them and one of our hired taxi-brousses, while the other volunteers
went back to Mananjary with the other campers. Seeing the joy in the girls’
faces as they splashed around made me extremely happy: between schoolwork and
helping out around the house, these girls barely get a chance to relax, let
alone visit a place like Ranomafana. I felt extremely fortunate and glad that I
was able to give them this small chance to take a trip and just have fun.
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| The Vangaindrano girls at Ranomafana! From left: Jemicine, Sonia, Emeren, me (who else sticks out this much?), Francia, and Angelina) |
After returning to Mananjary for lunch, more sessions, and
then dinner, we set up a special treat for the girls: a campfire with s’mores.
It doesn’t get much more typical American summer camp than that! After the s’mores,
the bonfire evolved into a dance party where they’d call someone into the
center to dance as everybody clapped and cheered. Inevitably, all of us PCVs
got called into dance quite often, but I gamely made a fool out of myself
dancing, and had fun doing it.
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| Jeremy instructing on s'more creation. |
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| Me and my campers in our GLOW camp t-shirts! |
The next day was our final day of camp, and although the
girls wanted the camp to go longer, all of us PCVs and chaperones were ready
for it to end: with all the planning, preparation, and daily work, it had been
an exhausting experience! We finished off the camp with a few more sessions and
a career panel where successful Malagasy women spoke to the campers about their
education and career paths. Then we distributed camp t-shirts to all the girls
and took some photos, before heading over to a nearby dance club (at 3pm, mind
you) for our special end-of-camp party, expertly arranged by Nick. The girls
got a chance to dance with the club all to themselves, plus enjoy soda and tsaky-tsaky (fried snacks such as
samosas and french fries), and once again, they didn’t want to leave.
The next day we all had early-morning wake up calls to get
everything and everyone packed up and ready to go home. Despite our brousse
debacle the week before, the transportation home ended up being fine, and our
driver showed up at 8AM for the long trip back to Vangaindrano (but first,
Ambalona to drop off Nick and his girls, then Farafangana for Jeremy and his
crew.) It was a long, long trip back home, and Francia, Emeren, Jemicine,
Angelia, Sonia, and I were all ecstatic once we finally pulled into
Vangaindrano at around 6pm. What struck me was that when we had all left
Vangaindrano a week ago, the girls were shy, quiet, and not talking much. But
when we rolled back into town, we were all joyful and exuberant, blasting
Rihanna and dancing and singing along together. It may not have been much, but
my small effort to have a little impact on these girls’ lives already seemed to
have brought out their confidence and happiness. And for that, I came home
elated.
