Camp Glow

August 19, 2011

Camp Glow

From August 8-11, in three separate groups, each a day apart, we traveled on nice coach busses (clean, air conditioned, padded seats, and equipped with a flat screen to show movies!) three hours south to the city/village of Boromo to check out Camp GLOW.  Actually, it’s Camp G2LOW (G^2, i.e. G-squared), which stands for “Guys and Girls Leading Our World.”  Camp Glow is a Peace Corps sponsored initiative that is held all over the world in many (if not most) of the countries where there are currently Peace Corps Volunteers serving.  This year was the premiere year of Camp Glow in Burkina Faso, and so we were there to help with its kick-off and get ideas for what we’ll do next year, when we plan our own Camp Glow for whatever region of Burkina we’re living in.  We were there during the girls’ week (the boys’ camp was being held the following the week) and got to see over 60 middle-school aged girls participate in the 5-day intense leadership/life-skills camp, which included sessions on hand-washing, goal-setting, journal-decorating, tie-dye-T-shirt-making, malaria-and-AIDS-prevention-educating, and more. 

The camp was held at a school, so the girls and counselors (i.e. PC Volunteers and Burkinabe homologues) slept on the floor in classrooms.  Unfortunately it rained the first night and flooded the classrooms and all the girls’ stuff.  So, when my group arrived, we got the privilege of cleaning out other classrooms for the girls to sleep in.  Which meant first taking out over 100 heavy 4-foot long desk/table contraption things and stacking them on top of other desks in other classrooms, then sweeping with little hand-held brooms that essentially resemble a witch’s broom but without the stick.  The rest of this laborious (and dirty) task included: moving all the girls’ clothes and sleeping mats, untying every girl’s mosquito net, carrying it to the new classroom, and then re-hanging all the nets from the walls/ceilings.  Fun. Speaking of rain.  It was raining (aka pouring) when our nice coach bus first pulled into Boromo.  And we had a 3 mile walk from the bus station to the camp/school.  While carrying our awkwardly-sized bags of luggage, of course.  Lovely.  However, much to our surprise, before we started walking a Peace Corps vehicle pulled up and told us that we no longer had to walk – we would get to ride in the car, 4 people at a time.  It took a while to finally get everyone at the camp site, but waiting at the bus station for the car to come back was definitely much better than walking in the rain with our bags.  Plus the bus station was the equivalent of an American mall, with tons of vendors located alongside the station walls and yummy treats being thrust into our face by little children entrepreneurs. There were dried mangoes, fresh apples, loaves of sweet bread, whole roasted chickens, hard-boiled eggs, and more.  Naturally, it’s assumed that we foreigners have money (and well, let’s be honest, we do), and so EVERYONE follows us and swarms around us.  No matter how many times we politely (or not so politely) say, “No, thank you,” they persist on trying to sell us their products: “Madame, bananas.  2 for 100 CFA.  Madame. Please, Madame! Bananas!” (and the whole time the look in their eyes is screaming, “Why would you refuse me? Madame, I’m hungry.  I’m a hungry little child.  How can you say no to me? Please, I beg you, buy my bananas.)  It’s difficult, but we do refuse them. Sometimes.  Yeah, we’re kind of jerks like that, not spending all our money on whatever items they’re selling.

While visiting Camp Glow, we slept at a Catholic mission that was about 2km away from the school.  The mission was operated by a little old nun from Germany; she was really cute and super nice.  There were four beds in each room, but my room had 6 girls in it, so we pushed the four twin-size beds together to make one giant bed and had a slumber party.  It was all fun and games, playing truth and dare, deciding which male in our group was the cutest, gossiping about each other’s clothes, and other activities common amongst 13-year-olds…until we heard scratching and clawing coming from inside the walls.  Despite there being a crucifix on one wall and a picture of Mary on the other, we were not kept safe from hearing the disturbing sounds of bats fluttering throughout the building’s walls and roofs ALL night long.  Our room was nice, clean, and actually had real walls (stained wood, as opposed to dirt), along with comfy beds (compared to what we have with our host families), and yet none of us were able to enjoy these niceties and get a good night’s rest for the few days we were at Camp Glow, all because of the stupid bats.  We couldn’t believe it, but we were actually looking forward to returning home to Sapone’s screaming donkeys and crowing roosters, since we would be able to get at least a few hours of shuteye there.

The mission was equipped with a small kitchen, and so we pooled our resources and money and attempted to make banana bread.  The “other” Beth in our training group (aka Elizabeth N.) and I headed up the baking, along with a few other helpers, aka people who stood and watched us work, and then tried to snitch samples of the batter.  There was no baking powder or baking soda in Boromo, so Beth and I experimented with using regular yeast.  It worked.  Kind of. 35 mashed-up bananas and a bag of flour later, we had 4 large cake pans full of warm, delicious banana bread/cake-like goodness that were instantly attacked and devoured by all of us Peace Corps Trainees. Me: “Careful, it’s hot.”  Others: “I don’t care, I want a piece now!”…*takes a big bite*… “Ouch! Dang that’s really hot! It burned my tongue!”  Me: “I told you so…”   Everyone loved it, and I even had people begging to eat the burnt crust corners.  Yes, our taste buds have been destroyed by being in Africa – anything and everything seems to taste good now, such as burnt crust.  Raw peanuts and dry bread slathered with mayonnaise have also become popular favorites amongst us stagiares.  Don’t be surprised if we come back to America and try to order bread with mayonnaise in a fancy restaurant or ask for a hot glass of powdered milk.  In addition to people trying to eat what I had deemed as inedible, there were also others bribing me (though sometimes “threatening” me was more like it!) to give them a third or fourth piece: “Come on, both you Beths, please.  My first piece fell in the dirt.  So I didn’t get one.  Then Joe ate my second piece.  And my third piece was way smaller than everyone else’s.  Please, just one more piece!”  The secret to our banana bread was that we DIDN’T follow a recipe (we just threw stuff into a big bowl) and then made a crumb/sugar topping to sprinkle on top.  In our Peace Corps Burkina Faso Recipe Book, there’s a recipe for “Big Julie’s Bitchin’ Banana Bread,” so the joke amongst everyone was that we should name our recipe “Big Beth’s^2 Bitchin’ Banana Bread,” (Beth-squared) in honor of the two Beth’s that made it.  I’m fine with that. 

Also, while at Camp Glow, I met the infamous Sam – the other current volunteer in Burkina who went to St. Ben’s / St. John’s with Lindsay and me.  Sam was helping run the camp, but we got some time over lunch to chat and reminisce about Bennie/Johnnie events, SJU football games, and our favorite professors, while everyone else stared and wondered what in the world we were even talking about: What the heck is The Link?  Who is David Arnott?  Gary’s Pizza? The Rat Pack?  Tommies suck? Huh?  All in all, it was a good experience to observe Camp Glow for a couple days.  For being its first year, there were a lot of good things happening and thus a lot of potential to work off of for any future camps.  But, because this was the first year, there were also a lot of downsides, mainly dealing with logistics and scheduling.  From an American perspective, any typical American kid probably would’ve been thinking, “This is dumb.  I’m bored.”  But for the Burkinabe adolescents, this camp was a big deal.  Camps (as in Basketball Camp, Leadership, Boy Scouts, Bible…etc. or any other topic there might possibly be a camp held for, as we know of them in the USA), aren’t necessarily unheard of here in Burkina.  But at the same time, they’re pretty rare.  And thus, seriously, camp is a BIG deal.  For many of the girls, it was the first time they had ever left their village.  They got to meet other girls from nearby towns, decorate journals with pictures representative of their goals, and eat s’mores.  From an American perspective, there wasn’t anything too special or exciting at this camp, but for the Burkinabe, everything was a treat.  It was reassuring to see that even the simplest of activities are well-received by the Burkinabe, which means that when we’re planning our own camps next summer, we don’t have to put all of our energy into thinking of “fun” and “new” things to entertain kids with, like we would if we were in America.  Instead, we can simply draw from all the typical camp things we did as kids at camp in America, and focus more on the actual logistics of the camp, like resources, money, transportation, and involvement/leadership/facilitation of camp sessions by Burkinabe locals, so that they can run similar camps in the future without depending on the assistance of a Peace Corps Volunteer, which is the long-term goal of all Peace Corps programs throughout the world: empower the people of a country to empower themselves.

Since I’ll be in the Sourou Valley (aka DABA valley aka Party Valley) with over a dozen PC friends nearby, we’ve already begun talking about ideas for a massive Camp GLOW in our region.  It’s gonna happen.  And it’s gonna be awesome.  I’m personally going to invest some effort into composing a camp song or cheer or something of that nature. 

On the way home from camp, I picked up a bunch of goodies from the mall/bus station to bring home for my host family: dried mangoes, sugar-covered peanuts, a loaf of sweet bread, 2 apples, 2 oranges, and a banana.  All for a grand total of $2 American.  My family was really grateful for the gifts and ate everything that evening for supper, but they were also shocked/concerned that I spent “so much” money on them and tried to repay me, as well as serve me some of the treats.  I had to convince them it was solely a gift for THEM and that I didn’t spend very much money; I also had to lie and tell them that I wasn’t going to eat any of their gift because I had my own loaf of sweet bread and apples in my room… I SHOULD have had my own treats, but they didn’t make it home: I ended up eating them on the bus ride back.  But my family didn’t need to know that.  I wasn’t going to eat any of their gift, and that was final.  Oh yes, I also had spared a little piece of my epic banana bread for my family to sample.  They were excited to try “American” gateau (gateau, pronounced “ga-toe,” is French for cake/dessert), but they didn’t really like it.  I’m pretty sure they actually fed it to the chickens.  The banana bread was too flavorful and sweet for them – everything they eat here tends to be blah-tasting, whether it’s white rice or fried balls of flour with a hint of sugar in them – so it’s no surprise our banana bread (with all its sugar, oil, and cinnamon-streusel-sugar crumb topping) was a bit too much for them.  What a shame.  I’m sure the chickens liked it, but I’m thinkin’ any American currently in Burkina would have given a million dollars to eat that 2-day-old chunk of banana bread with streusel topping.