Camp Glow!

Background: Camp GLOW is a girls empowerment program started by Peace Corps volunteers in Romania in 1995 to take girls from the villages to have a leadership camp. Currently as many as 60 countries have their own forms of Camp Glow. Each year 3 camps are held in just Northern Provence.

Who: 11 volunteers from Kasama, Luwingu, and Mungwi districts. Eight volunteers brought two girls each from their respective villages to come for the week and one counterpart or teacher to come in for two days of training.

Jenny, Kim, and the girls doing a dance as a cool down after games

What:  GLOW- Girls Leading Our World is a camp that brings girls for a week of women's empowerment sessions and lots of fun. We held sessions on assertiveness, motivation, careers, HIV/AIDs, boyfriends, peer pressure and lots of other things. We also had all the fun things a camp should have too. There were games, relays, arts & crafts,  a huge campfire with s'mores.

Mirriam and Blessings presenting their group's ideas

When:  I got to participate in my first Camp Glow December 3rd-8th.

Where: It was at Kasama Farmer's Institute so we all had nice little rooms to stay in and tons of room to run outside. It is a neat opportunity for girls to get away from their village for a whole week. And like many American children at camp, many had hardly been away from home before.



Games were awesome all week.



Why: The goal of the camp, other than educating the girls who come, is to bring the concepts back to the village. To do this the girls selected to come to camp are going to be responsible with the assistance of the counterpart and volunteer to start a Glow Club at their school or in their community. In the club what the girls learned in camp will be passed on to their friends and peers.



The girls were split into four prides for the activities all week. Jenna and I headed up the Red Hots with Mirriam, Babra, Mercy and Rachel.