This Place About to GLOOOOOW (This should be sung to the tune of “Blow” by Ke$ha)

It was that time of year again.  GLOW TIME!  For those of you who are unfamiliar, Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) is a leadership camp for girls that is held annually in a lot of Peace Corps countries, including Cambodia.  Although the idea behind the camp and acronym are old hats, it’s up to each Peace Corps Volunteer to put their own spin on it and make it their own. 

This year was quite a different story, since my group of volunteers were now the “veterans” and responsible for most of the planning.  Planning any event is stressful, but planning an event in a country where time is not exactly of the essence and Murphy’s Law is inevitable, is a bit of a different challenge.  Needless to say, I was a bit stressed out, but it was a good reminder that I can still hack it in the real world and I probably won’t die in graduate school. 

Aside from a few very minor hiccups, everything went really well and I’ve gotta say, it’s all because I have a pretty extraordinary group of volunteers in my province.  The thing about PCVs is that they are not always awesome, but everyone who lives in Takeo certainly is. 

The team in our awesome Camp GLOW shirts

 But most importantly, I had a really great time with my students and I hope they learned a lot!  It was a three-day workshop spanning topics from women’s health, sex trafficking, CV writing, all the way to healthy relationships.  The girls also got to spend the third day at the beach picking up trash, learning about the downfalls of plastic and, of course, eating seafood and playing around on the beach.  Cambodia’s not so rough on the eyes sometimes. 

 

Making our country beautiful 

Camp GLOW is such a unique experience for these girls, since it’s the first time many of them have stayed the night somewhere other than their home, and the first time some of them have even left their district.  A lot of the topics we discuss, like women’s health and sex trafficking, are not commonly brought up, so I think it’s really important to start getting these topics in the common discourse. 

Brainstorming ideas about cooperation in relationships

Learning

It’s hard to know if these camps are ever really as effective as we hope for them to be, but it’s easy to see the difference in the girls I brought with me.  Since Camp GLOW, their confidence in class has risen and even the shyest girls were willing to stand up in front of their class and tell them what they learned.  And if nothing else, the smiles I got to see all weekend were well worth it.