So I am writing 3 days after the last day of our girls camp, Acampamento de Meninas 2008- Sua Mente..Seu Corpo...Sua Escolha (your mind....your body...your choice) that Whitney and I put together in Ribeireta last week. Overall it was awesome! The girls loved it and even though it was a lot of work I had a good time too. It rained 3 out of the 5 days but it was still a good time. We had around 16 girls and 4 youth leaders. The girls did the 35 minute walk from Calheta to Ribeireta. The agenda was based on a different subject for each day;
Monday-Lines of Communication
Tuesday-Making good decisions and leadership
Wednesday-Safe-sex
Thursday-Gender roles and Self esteem
Friday-Saying goodbye
Most of the subjects overlapped. We had the youth center director come and lead one session on good decision-making. The head doctor from theHospital came and talked about HIV/AIDS, Contraceptives, and Teenpregnancy. One lady from ICIEG (Instituto de Cabo Verdiano de equalidade e igualdade de Genero) which is like the national organization for promotion of gender equality came and lead a 3 hour. She did a session on Gender roles and self esteem. The session on safesex the girls were able to anonymously put questions or concerns thatthey had about those topics and the doctor randomly answered them throughout the session.Everyday they had an art projects. The did art projects where theyused whatever form they wanted to depict how they saw themselves, usedmagazines to pick out leaders and why, drawings talking about AIDS andearly pregnancy, and they made bracelets. We used one activity from the book that my sister sent me about making positive "flowers." The flowers exercise we used for the last day in which each girl was given 4 petals and had to choose 4 names (one petal for each girl), then theyhad to write a positive phrase or a word about that specific girl. They thought the activity was confusing at first but once they got it they loved it! Also on the last day we gave out completion diplomas.
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This weekend the trainees came to "shadow" us in Calheta. As we were walking around we saw 4 girls who went to the camp. They were so excited to see us. The showed the trainees all the things that they made and they could explain the different topics. One girl and her mom came to my house and her mom says that the girl wants to laminate her diploma. Another mom yelled my name in the middle of the street and was going on and on about how thankful she was because her daughter had such a good time! All of them want us to do it again. I am very glad it is over but I am even more excited that I actually got to do it.
The support once we really got going was unbelivable. The friday before camp Whitney and I made a competition amongst the youth group at the CEJ to see who could get the most donations by sunday. On sunday night we had over 20 kilos of rice, over 4 kilos of corn, sugar, flour, and 6000$00 eschudos given to us from neighbors and random people in the town. The store that I go to almost every other day gave us 30 eggs for free. CCS-SIDA(comite para combate SIDA) which is the governmentally regulated sector to fight AIDS in cape verde gave us money as well! We do have money leftover and according to people in the community I have talked to it can be used for extension projects with the campers and maybe even a boys camp if we wanted to do it. I had a really great time and it seems that the girls did as well!!!.JPG)
