Metamorfósis: Girls Growing Together

So there are three projects I am excited about working on during my additional 6 months of Peace Corps service: 1) additional workshops for English teachers; 2) Youth Leadership Camp for a second year; 3) an eco-efficient stove project (starting next week); and 4) an all-girls camp in Altagracia. A few weeks ago, working with my two Peace Corps sitemates Katie and Lindsay, we made the girls’ camp a reality! A camp is something I had wanted to organize for the first two years of my service, but my summer vacation month of January filled up last year with other camps and Peace Corps trainings, and I chose to spend the one-week vacations of April (Holy Week) and July (winter vacation) either traveling or relaxing. When my friend Katie mentioned the idea of organizing a girls’ camp to me last November, I responded enthusiastically.

The need for female empowerment is something that I think is evident to all Peace Corps volunteers in Nicaragua. The society here is very machista, or chauvinist. Not uncommon are the cases of girls who get pregnant early on and leave school to become poor, unemployed, stay-at-home single mothers, a role they are never able to break out of. The root causes of this are poverty and lack of education, specifically about risks and consequences of sexual activities. A lot of sensitive topics are considered taboo, and some girls feel they have no one to talk to about important personal issues, consequently leaving them unprepared when the time comes to make important decisions. Our goal with planning this camp was to give the girls the tools and education they needed to make responsible decisions and lead successful lives.

We recruited our newest island volunteer: an environmental volunteer from Balgue named Lindsay, who also responded enthusiastically to the idea. We met several times before Christmas to brainstorm ideas and draft schedules and budgets. Then in January, the real work began. I took on the challenge of writing the grant. We didn’t need much money, only $250 for everything, and we decided to apply for VAST funds, which are allocated to support projects combating HIV/AIDS. Since our project contained a significant amount of material related to this topic, it qualified to apply for funding. Writing the grant was tricky, because we need to hold ourselves responsible for results, so we had to write our objectives, the indicators that would measure if we met the objectives, and how we would measure the indicators. I had done this before for my oven projects, but the health sector’s objectives and indicators that need to be met are a whole other kettle of fish (as they say), and it took me a long time and many conversations with incredibly helpful Peace Corps staff to write it correctly. Katie took on coordinating with several local professionals to donate their time and expertise. We talked to the principals of the local primary schools and asked for their support in rounding up the best female students in 4^th-6^th grades to participate in the camp. We had everything ready to go for the first week in February, the final week of summer vacation for the girls. We decided to name the camp ‘Metamorfósis: Creciendo Juntas’ (Metamorphosis: Growing Together), using the metaphor of the caterpillar (the young girls) going through a transformative period in their lives (puberty, upcoming high school years) and becoming empowered to become strong and beautiful butterflies. I’m pretty sure the girls got the metaphor…

Katie, Lindsay, and I with our camp sign and butterfly hands

We had 60 girls participate from Altagracia and the surrounding communities, ranging in age from 9-13. We met in a local primary school. I was really proud of the synergy of my work in the past two years that I achieved: for example, of invaluable help to us throughout the week were my youth group kids (high school seniors from Altagracia) whom I had recently taken to Youth Leadership Camp with me, and were eager to give something back to their community by helping us out. Volunteering is a bit of a foreign concept in Nicaragua; sure they see foreign volunteers come in all the time, but the idea of a person volunteering for their community is not common, so my youth group kids are really special in that sense. I want to take a brief moment to summarize my youth group project, since I know my blog has not been too detailed. It started when I was able to take 4 students from Altagracia to Youth Leadership Camp last year, a national project organized by Peace Corps volunteers every year. Each participant is required to carry out some sort of community project after returning from the camp, so my kids and I decided to organize a youth group to share the information they had learned at the camp. They recruited about 2 friends each to participate and presented workshops on topics such as HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy, the environment, public speaking, and writing a personal budget (definitely a needed skill). Some of the participants then decided to give the workshops to the younger students in the high schools, and to a group in one of the outlying communities of Altagracia. It was one of the projects I was really proud of, watching the kids I had trained go give the workshops and educate their community members with very little assistance from me. When I had the opportunity to invite kids to Youth Leadership Camp this year, I brought 3 who had been participating in that group with me throughout the year.

          So, the point of that brief aside story is that my youth group kids were an invaluable support during the camp, helping maintain order, play games, run errands when necessary, and even give one of the workshops.

When planning our camp, we decided to give each day a unifying theme, with each theme accompanied by an empowering Beyoncé song to listen to and reflect on. Day one was Empowerment Day, accompanied by ‘Run the World’ by Beyoncé (Who runs the world? GIRLS!) We divided the girls into three groups and had them cycle through three rotations of 45 minutes each: Self-Esteem with me, Gender Roles with Lindsay, and Life Goals with Katie. Each day included a 30-minute snack break, which represented my second synergy component: every day I had one of the women who had built an oven through my previous project provide the snack, thus putting their ovens to good use to make a profit.

I think our camp went pretty well, but we were plagued by technical difficulties. The internet wasn’t working well (not surprising), so we couldn’t stream any of the Beyoncé videos with subtitles like we’d hoped, and Katie couldn’t access a lot of material for her presentation. Then for the rest of the week the school director showed up late, so we didn’t have access to the projector and had to cut all technological components, including a yoga session L Also Lindsay had come down with a nasty case of giardia the week before and was still weakened and in the process of recovery for most of the week. But these little setbacks didn’t keep us from having a great week!

The theme for the second day was Sexuality and Personal Health. Theme song: If I Were a Boy by Beyoncé in Spanish (Si Yo Fuera un Chico). For this day, we had a local psychologist named Karla come in to do a 2-hour group therapy session with half of the girls, focused on combined themes such as self-discovery, self-esteem, and empowerment. While she was doing this, the other half of the group attended two sessions. The first was on HIV/AIDS, given by some of my youth group kids who had attended Youth Leadership Camp the previous year. They did a fantastic job sharing information about HIV/AIDS with the girls: what it is, how it spreads, and its effects. The session was mostly a series of illustrative games: for example, they began with a game called ‘The Full House’, in which they read a story about two couples. One couple had good communication, practiced family planning, and finished their education before getting married and starting a family. The other couple, meanwhile, had a man who wouldn’t let his girlfriend use contraceptives, and they ended up having many children before they were prepared and had the resources to maintain them. The girls participating in the session had to act out each part of the story by squeezing all the family members into a 2 foot x 2 foot square marked by tape on the floor, then divide 1 or 2 packets of crackers amongst themselves, representing the family’s economic resources and distribution. There was another called ‘The Dance of the White Blood Cells’, demonstrating how HIV and AIDS affect the body’s immune system. One called ‘The Glitter Party’ demonstrated how one’s decisions regarding sexual activity affect their likelihood of contracting HIV, represented by one person with glitter on their hand who went around shaking the hands of others. The most entertaining, of course, was the Condom Race, where participants first competed to put in order the steps of using a condom, then had to demonstrate on a plantain.

 One of my favorite camp pictures. Look at the reaction of the girl in the middle when asked to grab the plantain (representing a man's sexual organ, of course). Priceless!

 Learning about family planning and safe sex through the game 'The Full House'. The couple on the left practiced family planning, finished their educations, got married, and had their first child when they were readu. Meanwhile, the couple on the right did none of those things and have way more children in their 'house' (2 foot x 2 foot square on the floor) than they can manage or feed!

Learning about HIV through the game 'The White Blood Cells'. The girls with the balloons are the white blood cells who are protecting the human, but when they are weakened by HIV (balloons popped, girls drop to knees), various illnesses can enter until finally AIDS comes and takes life away. AIDS was one of my youth group kids in a black cloak, all the girls screamed in terror when he entered.

Following this topic, I presented a session I am particularly proud of on male and female sexual anatomy. I made giant, color-coded diagrams of both (and learned a lot in the process, lol) then as a group we stuck labels on each part and discussed its function. After we did a game in which I read the description of the function, and one girl from each team had to run across the room and touch the correct part. This game went so-so, I think a lot of them got so caught up in the competition aspect that they weren’t processing the information, and a lot of times went to the incorrect sex (No girls, the eggs are NOT found in the man!) Then the girls had to correctly put the labels on each of the diagrams in groups, an activity I am happy to say they were able to do successfully.

Labeling the male reproductive system.

Our theme for Wednesday was Beauty, both inner and outer. Our planned theme song was Beyoncé’s ‘Pretty Hurts’, a song about the sadder side of being a model, but we unfortunately didn’t get to do it with the girls due to technological difficulties. One aspect of beauty that we focused on was keeping the earth beautiful. Katie opened the day by reading the book ‘The Giving Tree’ by Shel Silverstein, which she happened to have a copy of in Spanish. We then divided the girls into three groups and sent them through rotations. The first was with another local psychologist named Liliam. Unfortunately I didn’t get to spend a lot of time watching her presentation, but her focus was on inner beauty and discovering talents. The second rotation was given by a young woman from my community, Ana Gabriela, who recently graduated from university with a degree in Industrial Engineering (#rolemodel), though she was actually there because she had participated in a class given by a previous Peace Corps Volunteer on jewelry making, and is now selling earrings in some major tourist spots on the island. Her earrings are cool because they incorporate elements from nature found on the island, such as seeds, shells, and feathers, and recycled materials such as beads made from magazine pictures and plastic. She made a pair of earrings with all the girls, who were thrilled. The third session was given by Lindsay and focused on trash and recycling. She has a cool activity in which the girls have to guess how many years it takes specific materials to decompose (If my grandpa threw out a shoe when he was a child, it would just about be decomposed now. Glass takes a looooonnnnnngggggg time). Most of the guesses were nowhere close, but the ‘oh, wow!’ factor made an impression, I think. As a final activity for the day, we gave each girl a bag to fill with dirt and a seed of a tree called Madero for them to take home, care for, and hopefully plant in their yards. We weren’t able to follow up on this project very well, we can only hope that they followed through!

Thursday’s them was Sexuality and Sexual Health. It started off the same as Tuesday, with the groups switched. Then at the end of the day, we invited a German woman who has been a longtime resident of Ometepe and is known for traveling to different schools to give presentations on teenage pregnancy. Her presentation was hilarious and effective. Her manner of related to the girls and making them laugh while addressing serious topics is something very special and wonderful to behold, as she walked them through changes that occur during puberty, the appearance of sexual urges, how to prevent pregnancy, and consequences of pregnancy. She showed them a couple of fantastic videos developed by a Nicaragua NGO featuring Nicaraguans in Nicaraguan settings. One was a documentary following the stories of two teenage mothers, one from the city and one from a very rural setting, interviewing them around the time the baby was born and again about 4 years later. Hearing from their mouths how their lives were changed and how much they regret their decision was very powerful. The other short videos that she showed were staged with actors, but still powerful: one was a teenage boy talking to another teenage boy about using protection and not ruining a girl’s life, and the other one was a girlfriend successfully arguing against her boyfriend’s pressure to have sex and even become pregnant (‘Don’t you want to feel what it’s like? You’ll look so beautiful with your baby belly that represents the product of our love.’ To which the girls replies that her studies and her future are much more important to her, that she is a unique person not like everyone else, etc.)

Learning about teenage pregnancy with Karen

Our final day, Friday, culminated in a Water Safety Day that was a trip to Ojo de Agua, a local natural spring converted into a swimming hole and tourist attraction. After going over rules and how to properly use a life jacket, we were on our way! At Ojo de Agua, we divided into three rotations, with each group of girls accompanied by two of the youth group kids. Katie gave a basic swimming lesson, since she was a lifeguard and swim instructor in the US. Lindsay did a basic CPR class using a CPR dummy Katie had brought from the US and was so excited to finally get the chance to use, and I manned (wo-manned) the free swim station. The time passed all too fast; the girls were complaining that they wanted more swim time. But we were against the clock, we gave them their certificates of participation and dropped them off around noon, thus concluding a very busy, yet satisfying and fulfilling, week.

A group of girls during free swim time at Ojo de Agua

As a said before, this was a project I had wanted to do for a long time. However, it can be difficult to measure impacts of projects like this. They listen to us during the sessions, and we can check comprehension and understanding through basic questions, but how are we ever going to know if the information they learned from us is going to pop into their minds when they have to make important choices? And the impacts of presentations on self-esteem are even more difficult to measure, because self-worth is such an intangible thing.  But I think that overall our camp was a success that greatly benefitted a generation of girls, as it is our hope that they share what they learned with their families and friends.

Group photo. Probably should have told the photographer to get a little closer...