Okay, that’s not exactly what summer camp was like in my village. At the end of June, I did a day camp with a small group of kids who just finished elementary school. They ranged in age from 12 to 15 and were a mix of boys and girls. We started off every day with an ice-breaker. One great thing about working in Burkina is that EVERYTHING you do is new. These kids had never ever done a human knot or any of those other typical ice-breaker/team-building activities. It is a brand new experience for them. Following the ice-breaker was a game of soccer. Then it was time to get serious. The rest of the day was filled with sessions that followed a variety of themes. There were health lessons about malaria, HIV, nutrition, etc. There were life-skills sessions about decision making, being assertive, and making goals. We had basic English lessons and a study skills session. One hour was set aside for our “Panel of Professionals” which ended up being one self-made business man from town encouraging the students to work hard and not allow challenges to stop them from achieving their goals.
The camp ended at lunch time, except one day the girls came back after lunch to do a puberty/reproductive health talk and the boys came back the next day. The girls were very shy even without the boys but the boys were so much fun. They asked a LOT of good questions both during the session and using our anonymous questions box. There were so many great questions about all sorts of puberty/reproductive health/girl-boy things but my favorite? “How do I get a girl to fall in love with me?” Adorable.
A few other volunteers came down to help me with the camp and it was very fun having them in my village for a while. And they were VERY helpful with the camp (special shout out to Doug for doing an amazing job leading the boy’s reproductive health session as well as ice-breakers all week!).
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This past week, I also helped out at our regional Camp G2LOW (Girls and Guys Leading Our World). 121 middle school students from all over the western part of Burkina came to Dedougou to participate. This camp was an all-day sleep over camp for 5 days. While we did many sessions similar to the ones in my village camp, it felt more camp-like for a variety of reasons. First of all, we all had our own teams of students. All the meals were together, when there weren’t sessions we could hang out, etc. We had a fire one night and started to make s’mores until it began pouring rain and forcing us to finish the s’mores inside. All in all, it was a very fun and exhausting week.
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