Camp GLOW 2006

I returned from Nice, France just in time to head off to Camp GLOW, which I co-directed with two other volunteers. GLOW, a leadership camp for 120 teenage girls aged 14-17 that has been taking place annually in Moldova and other Peace Corps countries for several years, had been the main thing consuming my energy and time for several months, with things working up to quite a frenzy toward the end as we waited to hear whether we'd gotten our grant and had last-minute camper cancellations and so on. But in the end, it was a success! Sure, we ran into some interesting issues at camp: a nurse who might not really have been a nurse and was reportedly drunk all the time, and a linguistic battle between the counselors working with the Romanian and Russian girls (really just a microcosm of this problem as it exists in Moldova at large), but we did this camp for the girls, and their tearful goodbyes at the end of the week and the comments they wrote evaluating camp confirm that we achieved our goals.

During the first couple days of camp the girls didn't know what to make of the activity-packed schedule of an American-style camp (Moldovan camps are for resting), but by the middle of the week the girls had made friends and were actively participating in lessons and games. They also began approaching me to say how much fun they were having, and that they didn't want to go home. Following the puberty/sex ed and domestic violence classes I taught, I actually had girls come up to thank me for the information! It was incredibly satisfying to be giving these girls information that they hadn't been exposed to before, especially when through their questions I learned just how much misinformation is out there (e.g. "is it true that birth control pills protect against STDs?").

On another level, I think our camp gave the girls an opportunity to relax and be silly and not take themselves so seriously. This is particularly important, I think, because while in the US it is common for teenagers to be self-conscious, overly concerned with others' opinions, and so on, in Moldova I think this isn't confined to teenagers. People here in general are very risk-averse, afraid of sharing opinions, trying new things, being wrong...you should have seen me attempting to teach them the game Pictionary. In the US we shout out guesses as the person draws, not caring whether the answer is right or not; these groups of girls sat silently around the artist waiting for her to finish before saying anything. Sure, a poor translation of the rules is partly to blame -- especially considering I was the one doing the explaining, in Russian -- but I think this activity also illustrates some cultural trends.

A great activity for bringing out the girls' creativity and laughter was our Halloween disco.
This holiday was foreign to the girls, and most of them didn't know we would have this event when coming to camp. We sent the girls off to their cabins and into the woods telling them to come up with a costume out of any materials they could find, and they proceeded to come back swathed in blankets, with wall decorations perched on their heads, draped in vines, and anything else you could think of. I decided to forgo the typical pretty/sexy costume route and instead donned a friend's mosquito net, penciled on some tatoos (note my culturally appropriate boy roster inside the heart: Ion, Oleg, Vlad), and became punky bride girl. The girls absolutely loved it -- I got so many photo requests I might have been working at Disneyland.

Lastly, I was excited to see that camp had a positive affect not only on the girls, but also on the Moldovan counselors. Originally our project's counterpart, a Moldovan NGO, provided us with all our counselors, but when one dropped out I pressed to have a local friend of mine taken on. I guess you could say that my friendship with this young woman is a sort of secret development project I've got going, with me and my friends in Balti inviting her to our dinner parties and helping her with setting up her own non-profit organization and so on. Well, over the course of the week I watched this normally timid 20-year-old teach classes, give announcements, and serve as a sort of medical assistant around camp. The girls loved her and I think this was probably the first time she'd found herself in a leadership type position before. I saw her become more assertive and show her personality more, and knew that it had been a good idea to bring her along. But the most satisfying aspect of this was when she herself approached me toward the end of camp to say, "Bridgett, I don't know how this camp is affecting these girls, but I know it's already changed me." She then asked me to tell her about my BA program in the US and what sort of things social workers do, because she'd decided to switch from law to the social work major at her university.

We returned from camp and back to real life July 3rd, and as I predicted, it was a bit hard to adjust to normal life after the high energy and stressful atmosphere of camp. I don't think I've ever had a job that left me so exhausted at the end of the day, but I've also never been so busy and challenged. The other coordinators and I took a month off, then began meeting to discuss plans for next year's camp. When problems cropped up at camp, "next year it will be different" became a sort of mantra for us, and I'm excited to put our ideas into action. At the same time, the US Embassy, our primary funder this year, has said it will no longer be funding camps, so we may be looking at another frantic search for money next year. One of the major goals for this and all Peace Corps camps is that it will eventually be run and staffed by Moldovans, however, so this lack of embassy funds might actually be positive in that it forces us to slash our budget and thus take another step in the direction of sustainability.