The Road Less Traveled : Camp GROW & GLOW

Wow! Where do I even begin? The past 6 weeks have been so eventful that I barely know how to start. As I type these sentences I feel like I need to take a step back, collect my thoughts, inhale deeply, and just write. However, there is no time for that – I have neglected this blog for far too long – and I simply have to pick a place to begin. I have thus made the executive decision to go back to mid – December to talk about the 4 days of Camp GROW and GLOW in this post, and I will update my blog in a few days with a brief description of my time in the US, my trip to the island of ‘Eua with my host family, and my week long Peace Corps training on the main island.

First, before I even begin, I want to thank everyone who made GROW and GLOW possible. To all of my family and friends who contributed to the project, I remain incredibly touched by your generosity. I and the other volunteers strove to live up to those contributions, and in my humble opinion I like to believe that the camps, made possible by your generosity, did make a difference. I hope I will be able to show everyone that in the following paragraphs. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

The morning of December 9^th started off with nervous anxiety – would the kids come? Were we capable of leading a 4-day camp filled with 13-year-old kids? Did we have the right speaker’s lined up? Trying to retain a calm exterior, I was undeniably excited yet anxious. Walking around I tried to make sure everything was ready for our campers’ arrival, willing them in my head to just get hear already, fearing they wouldn’t, and inevitably somewhat fearing they would. Slowly but surely, however, the kids began to arrive. The camp had begun.

Now the hard part began. The other volunteer, Joey, and I had spent months developing GROW, along with Mandy, who focused on the girls camp GLOW, but now we had to step back, ensure the arrival of our speakers, and work more as facilitators as our 4 Tongan counselors, all under the age of 21, took control. The camp ran smoothly from the very beginning. The first few hours were spent playing getting to know you games (the campers came from a myriad of high schools and didn’t all know each other) and discussions of the expectations they would have as campers. We told them that the onus was on them to make these four days special, that the more they participated and contributed the greater the experience would be.

The rest of the first day was spent with our two guest speakers, nurses discussing sexual education and healthy life styles, such as nutrition and exercise. Though the topics we’re a bit weighty for a first day, the kids were dynamic, continually asking questions and enjoying a friendly game of healthy food bingo. After a filling dinner, one of our counselor lead a session about goal setting and decision making, which made the kids, for possibly the first time in their young lives, begin to think what they wanted out of their high school experience and beyond. One of our goals was to challenge their thinking and see how it evolved over the course of the four days. For bedtime, we watched GI Joe on the projector.

I promise to spare you the tediousness of going through a play by play of all four days, but I just wanted to provide an example of one day in the life of the Camps.

There were of course numerous highlights to mention:

1. On the second day, Tuesday, the boys of GROW and the girls of GLOW came together for the first time to listen to a speaker from the environmental NGO in Vava’u and then head out for an beach day and bbq at a Tongan-owned resort. In case any of you were wondering if teenagers in Tonga differed from their American counterparts, this will quickly answer your question. When they boys learned we were going over to see the girls, they all rushed to put on their best clothes, swabbed on deodorant, and bathed themselves in cologne. I learned later, that the girls similarly took showers, brushed their hair, and dressed up a bit. Of course, when they actually were around each other, there was little interaction between the two sexes.

2. We had an incredible array of compelling speakers who offered great presentations for our kids. We had a court judge and the head of the University satellite school in Vava’u discuss women’s rights and domestic violence. The Deputy Principal of the Catholic High School lead a session on post-secondary school educational opportunities. A wide variety of government ministries and companies brought the campers into their places of business for several hours to stress the wide range of career opportunities available to them in Tonga. And last but not least, our counselors each lead individual sessions on anger management, drugs and alcohol, decision-making, critical thinking, and goal setting, which they performed exceptionally well.

3. Perhaps, most importantly of all, relationships were made and friendships established. The boys of GROW and the girls of GLOW left with lasting memories, a few lessons in their head, a desire to bring back what they learned to their communities and schools, and forged shared bonds with a new group of people.

If I come off as to much of a homer for this project, that is because I am. Not everything worked out as we would have liked – we were hoping for a larger number of campers, one of the nurses did not show up for her presentation, and we have to tweak our career day event – but on the whole the other volunteers and I, the counselors, and the campers were incredibly happy with how the week went. We took a girls camp, GLOW, that we knew nothing about before coming to Peace Corps and continued it’s growing legacy in Vava’u, and developed GROW, a boys camp to run parallel with the girls camp for the first time in Tonga.

As is often the case in Peace Corps, I have grown a lot through the process of developing this program and in many ways feel that I got more out of it than even the campers and counselors did. It was truly a special week for me. Many of you may be asking me what is next and that is a great question. Our next steps are to continue to meet with our male and female campers to discuss how to continue to use the lessons they learned over the 4 days of the camp and how to bring these values to their villages and classmates. We also have to begin planning for GROW and GLOW 2014 next September, which will be one of my final acts as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Thank you all for reading. Before I leave you to the photos, I want to say one last thing. If I seemed to take a disproportionate amount of credit for the camp in the previous paragraphs, I want to dispel that right hear. Yes, myself and other volunteers spent months of hard work developing this project and making it feasible, but the true credit lies with two groups of people: The people back home who made this all possible by donating to GROW and GLOW, and the incredible Tongans who housed the camps, fed us, spoke to our campers, served as counselors, the parents who trusted us with their children, and the students who arrived as campers. The true success of the camps and their future is reflected in our thanks to the first group and the indomitable spirit of the second. Thank you all.