Camps

Camps are a huge part of the Peace Corps experience.  They have also been a large part of my life in the past attending summer camps for at least 5 summers and also working at summer camps for at least 5 summers.  In the Peace Corps spirit most of our camps try to work on or take on some underlying issue.  We have camps that focus on girls (GLOW girls leading our world) and camps the focus on boys (TOBE teaching our boys to excel).  Yes it is cheesy but these excursions for the youth of Kyrgyzstan offers them opportunities that they would never get.  During the school year and during the summer when the students aren’t at school they are usually at home playing an active roll in the household.  For girls this means cooking, fetching water, doing dishes, washing laundry, helping watch the kids, milking the cows etc. and for the boys this could include taking care of animals, working in the yard, and other forms of “manly” manual labor.  The idea of going on vacation and relaxing in the summer exists here but it is with your family.  The camps Peace Corps helps organize, offers Kyrgyz youth an opportunity to socialize and learn outside of the Kyrgyz cultural bounds.  We can openly discuss topics on gender, violence, sex, alcohol, healthy relationships and other issues that do not ever make it into family  discussions or the school curriculums because they are considered ooyat (shameful) to talk about openly.  However once you get the youth away from their homes and normal everyday life they will talk about the issues, often passionately and openly.  It offers them a time to learn life skills they are never given a chance to learn in the village or city.  I remember last summer when I was doing lessons on HIV/AIDS and reproductive health for boys aged 14-17 how little they knew about those topics and how many questions and misconceptions we were able to talk about.   

Not all of the camps we do are focusing on heath and healthy lifestyles.  We do fun camps too.  I had the opportunity to help out with a winter sports camp that was put on by the American Corners Kyrgyzstan over winter.  This camp was exactly what it sounded like.  We hung out in the mountains and did winter things.  Ice skating, snowmen making competitions, snow ball fights, sledding, skiing, and for me getting to act like a kid in the snow (something I was never able to do growing up in Florida).  We played team building games, arts and crafts and just had quality interactions.  The students at this camp all spoke some decent amount of English and were kids chosen from the organization.  The American corners is an organization sponsored by the US State Department that works to share American culture throughout the world.  They do this by sponsoring English clubs, talking clubs, and other “American” activities.  They also do a summer sports camp where they hang out at the beach in Issyk-kul for a week doing summer beach things.  Here is a video from our camp.

This brings me to my camp.  This summer with my counter part we are putting on a health camp.  The last 2 months I’ve been busy writing the grant and going through the Peace Corps bureaucracy, we are a government organization after all, and I am still waiting for the final approval and dispersion of funds for the camp.  Hopefully this will happen soon and no problems will arise because our camp is scheduled for the beginning of June and moving it to a later date may not be possible.  Our idea for our camp came from attending numerous trainings on HIV/AIDS, gender, and a healthy families training.  In our village very little to no health lessons are taught at our schools.  If there is a country wide initiative to teach even the most basic health and hygiene topics it is failing.  I recently did a survey with 14-18 year old students and a sample size of 101 at our village school and one of the questions was “Do you learn basic hygiene and hand washing methods at school regularly?” and the response was 59% said yes and 41% no.  I don’t fully understand the split in yes’s and no’s but it clearly shows that it is not happening on a regular basis.  During the past 2 years our village has had a Hep A rate (can easily be prevented by consist and proper hand washing) that was up to 4 times higher than the rest of Kyrgyzstan’s.  This is just one example of a health issue in my village that we can work on.  Knowing such gaps in knowledge and behaviors we decided the most effective intervention could be to work on getting the schools to add a health component to their curriculums.  That is the ultimate goal of our camp.  My village is the central village for 6 villages that make the Ak-Terek region.  We are going to bring 3 students from each of the village schools, 1 teacher, and 1 village health committee member from all of the 6 villages.  A village health committee is a volunteer in a village that is supposed to work on health outreach and education.  They do not get paid and often do not do much.  They are volunteers and have other jobs, and families to worry about so I am not hating on them, but they do have a great potential to do meaningful work and we will try and harness this during our camp.  Our camp is going to consist of 16 health topics that we have identified as being pertinent to our community and we are working with 3 student trainers at my school, my counterpart, and an English teacher to create the lesson plans as well as a resource book we will give all of the participants.  After the camp we are requiring all the villages to teach at least 6 health lessons at their schools on alcohol and smoking, reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, hand washing and basic germ theory, healthy eating, heart disease, and dental health.  These are the 6 topics we believe will be most useful to students in our community.  I am confident the camp will run smoothly with the amount of preparation that has already gone into it, but I believe the follow up and getting the villages to teach their lessons could be a challenge.  We are going to visit every village while they give one of the 6 lessons and we have reporting forms for them to fill out but hopefully they will be motivated and fulfill then exceed our requirements. 

Camps are often thought of as something that Peace Corps does just because they have been doing it, but I truly believe they play a critical role in the development of youth and transferring skills and knowledge to them.  With those hopes I am very optimistic about my camp and the results we will achieve come fall when the schools teach their lessons.  Writing and planning a camp from start to finish is much more of a challenge then showing up and teaching students for 7 weeks and I have learned a lot in the process.