Girls Camp 2012!

And with that, Thies Girls Camp 2012 is complete!  After a wonderful week of talking about nutrition and reproduction and the environment and gardening and possible careers and business and marketing and everything in between, camp came to a tearful close a few Fridays ago.  And yes, when I say tearful, that is what I mean.  The girls started thinking about departure a full 24 hours before it actually happened, which added a flair of drama to Thursday night’s talent show.  One moment, everyone was dancing to Rihanna and having the time of their lives!  In the next moment, Beyonce’s Halo had reduced all of the girls to blubbering messes as they clutched their new friends in a swaying dance circle.  Lesson?  You can put a girl in a week-long camp and help her escape a week’s worth of housework… but she can never escape her teenage hormones.  In the best way!

Kathleen, Rita, and I pose with Aissatou, one of our counselors, and my some of my Thies girls on the last day of camp.

No, but truly, camp was wonderful.  All of my fellow PCVs did a fantastic job with the sessions they’d prepared, forcing the girls into three-legged races, teaching them about dental hygiene, showing them the beauty of the environment, and awakening their quiet entrepreneurial spirits.  All of our Senegalese counterparts did a phenomenal job as well, inspiring the girls to try eggs instead of just chocolate for breakfast, clarifying mystifying concepts like the power of the moringa plant, and giving them honest, and thoughtful advice.  And the girls?  The girls were amazing: they jumped right into the spirit of camp from day 1, participating in every session, asking questions, taking notes, making fantastical artistic creations, never complaining, and as it appeared to me, never sleeping.  By the end of camp, they were all resolved to start their own clubs in order to teach other people what they’d learned, keep in touch, and maybe even take field trips to the other cities.  Win!

Somehow, I was put in charge of explaining the idea of dreamcatchers to the girls.  It went something like this: "You hang this net over your bed and nightmares get caught like fish and good dreams pass through!  It is a traditional object from the first Americans who lived among the environment!  Put yarn to kill nightmares!"  

Hard at work making moringa porridge for tomorrow's breakfast.  

Rita and Chelsea use our beautiful training center to show examples of plants and live fencing.

The girls painted tires to use as recycled plant containers.  My host sister Fatimata is in the neon!

Out of all the sessions, I think the one that really came to define camp, at least for me, was the presentation given by our gender and development advisor, Awa Traore.  I’ll give you a little snapshot of it (with words, because no one had a camera during this session):

Before Awa came, the girls watched a Peace Corps-produced movie following five working women in Senegal, Awa included.  Each of the women told her personal story, paying special attention to the challenges she’d faced over the course of her life.  The women talked about balancing work, family, and tradition, especially emphasizing the important and irrefutable role that Senegalese women play in society.  Then, at the end, they challenged the girls to continue their educations and find a way to improve life in Senegal.  I led a brief reflection after the movie, mostly quizzing the girls to see if they’d paid attention.  They had.  In fact, a few nights later my host sister called me into the living room to point excitedly at the news, where one of the film’s women was being interviewed on TV. 

But what made an even bigger impact was the appearance of Awa herself after the film, a living and breathing version of the figure they’d just watched on-screen.  Awa worked the crowd like nothing I’d ever seen.  In one instant, she riled them up with an improvised skit about how boys flirt in Senegal --  only to bring the girls to a hush moments later by asking them soul-jarring questions.  She found a way to make the room’s atmosphere both completely safe, completely honest, and completely empowering. 

The first point she talked about was ROMANCE, which obviously hooked the girls from the get-go.  In addition to that reenactment of flirting, she also talked about the difference between provocation and confidence.  Then, in one of my favorite moments of camp, she said, “Having a boyfriend isn’t a problem!” (dramatic pause)  “But when DOES a boyfriend become a problem?”, which led to shouts of “When he takes time from your studies!” “When he asks you for money!” and “When he gets you pregnant!”  From there, Awa segued into a frank discussion about sexual violence, incest, and the rape, but did it all with the effervescence of a sage.  The girls rose to the occasion, gravely absorbing each word with wide eyes and nodding heads.

Next, Awa asked the girls about their future plans.  Hands shot up.  “Doctor!” “Lawyer!” “Diplomat!” “Engineer!”  -- all of them had a chance to share with her exactly how they saw themselves.  Then she asked all of the girls to close their eyes and imagine a scene 10-15 years from now.  Where were they?  What were they doing?  Who were they with?  After a few moments, she asked a few girls to share, and I loved their answers:

•   “I was with my husband.  We were both studying in a library in America to be lawyers.  I was sending money that I earned there to help my family here.”
• “I was in Greece on a beautiful beach, living in a beautiful house with my family.  I had my degree on the wall.”
• “I was in my clinic that I owned as a doctor, in Senegal.  After work, I go home to my sincere, honest, faithful husband and our two children.”

After many girls had shared, Awa then asked, what would happen if you got pregnant right now?  What would happen if you stopped going to school right now?  Would these dreams still be possible?  The girls thought about what she said, and she then ended it with my favorite bit of advice:

“You all need to take responsibility, right now, for your choices.  Whatever those choices may be – you must deal with the consequences.  The consequences may be good or they may be bad.  But either way, you have a responsibility to yourself and your dreams to face them head on.  And you must decide how you will go forward.”

And to me, that kind of became my overarching theme for camp – not only that bit of advice, but Awa’s whole presentation: I wanted the girls to see how all of their choices do factor into their lives.  I wanted them to understand that they do have choices, even if that choice is only in how they react or voice their opinions.  And I wanted them to remember how capable Awa had made them feeI.  If they took anything from camp, I hope it was from this session.  And from the way I heard them continue talking about it, they did.

There were other amazing moments from camp, inevitably.  I’ll never forget the high-pitched squealing that accompanied each chastely romanctic scene from Bend It Like Beckham (such a good choice for Senegalese city girls!  The story about balancing the desire to be a soccer star with the disapproval of your highly traditional family resonated so well! Plus, they loved the Indian dance scenes, clothes, and really identified with the overly dramatic matriarchal figures!).  Throughout the week, I also adapted Valparaiso football cheers to various directions and moments.  A big favorite was the "Ooga ooga" chant, which we used to do things like "go to the back room" and "get ready for lunch."  I’ll also never forget how our talent show somehow became a comedic roast of me.  It’s not just at American camps that the camp director becomes the comic relief and buffoon!  I would have been offended if they hadn’t also done such great skits about how to not die from malaria or get knocked up.  Also, they kept serving me tea.

So, in essence, thank all of you for supporting me and my neighbors with this project!  It turned out far better than I expected, and I couldn’t have survived the process with so much encouragement from back home!  I’m excited to keep in touch not only with my girls over the next few months, but also a lot of the Senegalese counterparts who stopped by too.  Just yesterday, I stopped by the school to pay the registration fees for my scholarship winners.  So begins another year!  And so concludes this chapter of Thies Girls Camp: edition 2012.  All my love!

Campers, volunteers, and counselors, 2012 :)

And, for the blog cliffhanger, prepare yourselves for future entries about my recent brush with attempted robbery and a critical analysis of dancing in Senegal.  COMING SOON!

Guys Love Girls with (Life) Skills (and vice-versa)

You may have noticed that I occasionally allude to a mysterious “Life Skills/NGO/Plan project” ... without ever really delving into what it is.  WELL.  Get excited everyone, because by reading this entry, you have unwittingly bought a ticket to the LIFE SKILLS EXPRESS.  And this train... no, I don’t want to use metaphors.  I’ll just try to give you the lowdown on what I’ve been up to.  But yes – the secret of Lisa’s Loch Ness monster will be no more!  Saskwatch will be revealed, and you will feel the wonder of Laura Dern when she realizes that it’s not just an island... IT’S AN ISLAND OF DINOSAURS!  Anyway:

So Plan, formally Plan International, is an NGO with a primary focus on children’s rights: the right to live in healthy environments, the right to economic security, the right to education, the right to citizenship, among others.  In Senegal, most of Plan’s work centers on the adoption of communities and the creation of advisory councils encompassing all ages and types of people to make decisions about community projects.  These projects often involve health initiatives (like improving hospitals and medical centers), water and sanitation initiatives (like supporting safe well projects), and economic empowerment activities.  Currently, one of Plan’s nationwide projects is the Youth Economic Empowerment program – and that’s the one I’ve been working on.

My favorite guard Fall poses in front of Plan's Thies Office

Since I’m technically a health volunteer (though not a technical one! Ha!), my participation in a “Youth Economic Empowerment” program may surprise and even frighten you.  It inspired those emotions in me, after all.  Lisa, who doesn’t really understand the interest rates on her student loans and still hasn’t grasped what the whole Bernie Madoff thing was about, was invited to play a pivotal role here?  Yes.  Just... yes.

More specifically, Plan wanted Peace Corps’ help in developing a Life Skills curriculum for their Youth Savings and Loans groups.  These groups were composed of young adults, mostly women, who had dropped out of school and were being taught basic financial literacy and savings methods.  To push the groups farther in hopes of having them USE their new financial knowledge, Plan wanted a program that would make them stronger, more confident community members and do things like become leaders, start their own businesses, and use their new money to fully benefit themselves and their families.  Life Skills, as an idea, usually means a curriculum that builds confidence, increases communication skills, fosters critical thinking and decision-making, and informs about health and gender concepts.  Life Skills lessons seemed like a great fit for these groups of young people.

Here's a picture of me doing important work with a flipchart!

So that’s where Peace Corps came in, or, more specifically, a Peace Corps Response volunteer named Bethany... and me!  Bethany had already finished her Peace Corps service and was on the cusp of starting her Masters in Public Health.  She started building our curriculum based on a similar program in Niger, and to find out what lessons were needed in Senegal, visited the Youth Savings and Loans groups to informally survey them.  Her results showed what lessons would benefit the groups most, among them communication, confidence, early marriage and pregnancy, resolving conflicts, and sexual violence.  In developing these lessons, she incorporated lots of small skits, stories, and discussion questions meant to make the lessons participatory – not only forcing everyone to think outside the box a little bit, but also encouraging young Senegalese girls, often notoriously terrified of public speaking, to become comfortable discussing and debating.

Bethany had most of the manual finished when she left for grad school, and my task was to finish the manual, organize teacher trainings, and monitor the program during its early stages.  It took awhile for all of the stars to align, but finally, this past May, after final edits and a training seminar and many confusing months in between, Senegalese field agents started teaching our program to the Youth Savings and Loans groups.  So this past summer, a lot of my work has involved observing their classes, meeting with the facilitators to clarify the lessons and get their feedback, and finding ways to improve the program overall.  

One of the Kaolack YSL groups after their Life Skills meeting

I have found this process incredibly fun in the nerdiest possible way.  I made documents to record all of my observations and “qualitative data” (THERE I GO AGAIN! Nerd.) and researched ways to easily monitor the program’s impact.  I visited urban classes and rural classes, endlessly impressed by the teachers I’d helped train months earlier and their ability to goad semi-sulky teenagers into talking about the consequences of marrying at age 13.  And I fell into endlessly fascinating and informative discussions with the teachers themselves on everything to the merits of birth control, the problem of domestic violence, and the pride Senegalese women derive from gender distinctions in work.  I had to swallow my own pride at times, realizing that parts of our program that I loved simply didn’t work for them – and this project wasn’t mine, but theirs.  And sometimes, when the teachers insisted that certain topics, like sex outside of marriage, couldn’t be addressed, we managed to find happy mediums that informed the groups sensitively.  So I didn’t lose every fight.

Ultimately, I changed our Holy Life Skills Grail, “THE MANUAL” as I call it, according to the suggestions I received and the experiences I had.  It now boasts an easier to follow format recommended to me by the teachers (who are used to strict parameters in lessons), a section in each lesson relating to specific community problems, explicit exercises in critical thinking to consider the causes, consequences, and choices of issues, and an economic connection for each subject.  I also added some evaluation measures that can check informational retention and skill ability by groups, if supervisors choose to use them.  I feel like I have given birth to a healthy baby after a long gestation.  And I have no post-partum.

SO.  That’s what I do a lot of the time!  And moreover, the lengthiness above is why I so often avoid trying to explain it.  Believe me, it took me long enough to figure out the ins and outs of this job myself.  But on the whole, I’ve come to really value the project, and I do believe that encouraging critical thinking and healthy decision-making is one of the best development endeavors to be done.  I can’t really change the day-to-day life of Senegalese people, but the Senegalese people can.  And I believe in this program’s ability to help people start thinking more creatively and pushing themselves farther than they might have before.  Maybe some of them will even go on to start their own businesses or become community leaders.  Personally, I’d be completely content if it merely shifted the expectations and parameters for even a few families.  

Aissatou is president of her YSL group and used a loan to buy a refrigerator and start her own ice selling business (quite the enterprise in the hot trenches of Senegal).  She wants to become a certified Life Skills trainer now too.  Yay success stories!

And even though the curriculum for the project is now set, the work is not done!  At the end of September, I’ll be leading a training with Plan to extend the program to two more regions of Senegal, Louga and St. Louis, and then in December, we’ll be training peer educators to be Life Skills trainers as well.  In between, I’m hoping to lead the program myself at the middle school near my house.  Wish me luck!

I hope everyone has enjoyed this second installment of “WHAT LISA DOES WHEN YOU THINK SHE’S JUST EATING CHEETOS IN AFRICA.” See you next time!