camp GLOW

What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a young girl turning into a young woman? How does a young, confident powerful teenage girl become a positive and strong woman when living in a culture of machismo? What happens when you’ve been told something your entire life and then in five days, you get completely opposing information that makes you question everything your parents, grandparents, aunts, cousins and friends have lead you to believe?

Camp GLOW. Two words to change your life.

A girl sees her first tampon, her fear vanishes and she learns it WILL NOT take her virginity. Girls find out at what age they are supposed to have a pap smear, whether they are sexually active or not. A presentation is given questioning their diet and they start to understand that all the oil, sugar and surplus of carbohydrates they eat on a daily bases are not part of healthy diet. They openly discuss peer pressure from boyfriends and friends to be sexually active. They are given condoms like candy. They weigh the difference between unrealistic women on TV and themselves. A woman with AIDS stands in front of them without fear and tells them she has been living for 10 years with AIDS and is happy. Then she points to a girl in the audience, one of them, and says she is her daughter. A group of teenage Dominican Haitian girls, who live in a Batey, give a presentation about discrimination. In five days, girls become best friends with other girls who are taller, shorter, fatter, skinner, richer, poorer, different skin colors - and then cry when having to leave each other.

All of this happened at Camp GLOW. I was lucky enough to be there to witness it. I was even luckier to have had the opportunity to bring girls from La Caya so they could experience it.

Last week I took three girls from my community, (just for fun, see how you would pronounce these names) Yocairy, 15, Yoryi, 16 and Geormy, 14, to an all girls’ camp about an hour southwest of the capital. GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) is a Peace Corps international initiative created to empower young women to take charge of their lives, no matter their circumstances. GLOW originally was started by Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) in Romania in 1995. Today over 20 Peace Corps countries participate in GLOW activities and camps, including the Dominican Republic.

Our GLOW camp was a five-day retreat with 18 volunteers, 20 different communities and 57 Dominican girls between the ages of 12 and 20 representing these communities. Each day was a different theme with correlating charlas (the Dominican word for presentations) about the theme. For example the first day was “I am healthy,” and thus everything discussed that day had to do with keeping your body healthy (from eating right, exercising to getting regular pap smears).

I helped with the charla, “Know your body,” on the first day to encourage the girls to literally know their body. We actually gave each girl a hand mirror so they could, ahem, “explore” if you will, on their own. As we discussed the anatomy of a woman’s body and how we can take care of ourselves, it became apparent that many of the girls had been lead astray about what was and was not true about our parts.

As the week continued, breaking old believes and stereotypes became an objective for all of us Peace Corps Volunteers. The word “mitos” or myths was used over and over to question what exactly the girls were raised to believe and if those beliefs are true or not.

In one activity, we gave each girl a speculum tool for a pap smear and discussed that pap smears check for cancer and are important for ALL females to have once a year after the age of 18, whether they are sexually active or not. Later we decorated the speculums like birds so the girls would always think of them as birds and not be intimated by them when they went to the doctor for an exam.

We showed the girls what a tampon is and how it fits in a female body. We then discussed how neither a pap smear nor using a tampon will take away their virginity.

We had a “fiesta de condones” or a condom festival, where the girls had to practice putting condoms on plantains. Now this may seem grotesque for even our American culture, but in a country where over half of the population is under 25- teenage sex is not something to be squeamish or ignorant about.

On the third day, we had a panel of six professional Dominican women (a civil engineer, a TV and Radio journalist, a psychologist, a librarian, a business owner and a young Dominican-Haitian college student who traveled to Mexico) come to the camp to talk personally with the girls about how they came to be successful.

One Peace Corps Volunteer (who has an AIDS Support group in her town) gave a presentation about people living with AIDS. She shattered myths about being able to contract AIDS by holding someone’s hand, or washing your clothes with someone who has AIDS (yes, these are common beliefs). She then asked the girls what they would do if they knew someone had AIDS and was being discriminated against. They all said, “we would welcome them,” “we would be their friend,” “we would do whatever we could to help them.”

“Great,” the volunteer replied. And then she introduced them to an extremely well-dressed and pretty middle-aged Dominican woman. When this woman stood in front of the girls and told them she had AIDS, the girls’ mouths dropped in surprise. Then this well-dressed woman pointed to one of the girls in the audience and said the girl was her daughter (the daughter does not have AIDS). Many of the girls, including the daughter, started to cry. Later that day, my girls came up to me and said they thought the woman was a doctor and was going to talk about how NOT to get AIDS, not a woman who was already diagnosed and living with AIDS.
Myths and beliefs broken by living examples. It honestly doesn’t get much more impactful than that.

My personal favorite charla (presentation) was about discrimination and was given by five Dominican-Haitian girls attending the camp who live in a Batey. Batey’s are communities in the DR that were created by sugar cane companies. The companies would bring in the cheapest labor they could find (almost always Haitians) and provide minimal housing and amenities. These communities became known as Bateys and today, they still exist even though now most are supported by the DR government, not the sugar cane companies. The Dominican girls of Haitian decent went around the room and asked their peers to honestly answer if they believed “mitos” about Bateys. One of these myths was that people eat each other. A few of the girls in the audience were brave enough to raise their hands to say they used to believe it. The girls then shared individual testimonies about a time in their life they had been discriminated against because of their skin color.

As I looked around the room, I could see the girls watching their peers as just that. Peers. Friends. Someone the same age as them with many of the same hopes, dreams, fears and feelings. They weren’t watching each other with foggy glasses clouded with myths that the world has placed on them, but with their eyes wide open, taking in their surroundings and the people around them for what exactly what they are: people.

I was at this camp watching everyone around me grow and explore, I couldn’t help but feel the same way about myself. It’s funny how the simplest things are always the most impactful, like just being able to play Shakira’s World Cup song on repeat and dance your heart out. How having a real moment with someone, doesn’t involve anything with technology or fancy things. It’s just conversation and the opportunity to be open to something different, something you’ve never thought of before.

Being at Camp GLOW reminded me of why I joined the Peace Corps. It wasn’t for my resume or the bragging rights to say I did it – I took a bucket bath almost every day for two years, I deserve all the hot water I want. No, it was to be involved with something bigger than myself. I want to spend the rest of my life giving girls and boys around the world the right to choose their own world. To be able to look at their own circumstances and question if the life they want to live, the person they want to be, is the person they are now.

I think sometimes, we as humans take for granted how great change is. And how on any day, any normal, any boring or especially significant day, no matter how old or young you are, you can make the choice to be whoever you want to be.



I also posted pictures of the week on my picasa website if you are interested...