The Peace Corps and the Dominican Love One Teach One Foundation sponsored a Camp G.L.O.W. (Girls Leading Our World) on Dominica last week. Peace Corps volunteers worldwide lead GLOW Camps to help young women become better leaders, and to create stronger communities. The first GLOW Camp was established by Peace Corps volunteers in Romania in 1995, when three volunteers and four Romanian teachers took 80 young women to a mountain campsite for a weeklong leadership camp to help the young women improve their self-esteem and develop life skills. Since 1995, Peace Corps volunteers in more than 60 countries have established similar programs to promote the empowerment of women. You may read more about these worldwide Peace Corps camps for girls here.
This is the second year Peace Corps volunteers and our local counterparts have held Camp Glow on Dominica. 22 girls, ages 12-15 from all over the island participated in camp sessions on topics such as: self esteem, conflict resolution, diversity, sexual health, and HIV and Aids prevention, etc. Mixed in were fun sessions with riddles, games, and of course arts and crafts. I taught the craft sessions and we sure had fun! On the first day I taught the girls how to create a journal ---so they had a nice booklet to write and draw in for the whole week.
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| Here I am showing the girls how to sew the booklet together using a needle and embroidery floss. |
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| after they sewed their journals together then they decorated the journal's cover... |
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| I love how each journal is unique.....and we did some more art in the journals with foam stamps later in the week. The girls also used their journals to take notes from the sessions, and write their own ideas down. The first day I asked then to write 5 things nobody else knew about them in their journal..... |
The big hit of all the crafts I shared with the girls during the 5 days of camp was making friendship bracelets with colorful embroidery floss. The girls caught on quickly to the simple knotting technique we used and one evening I counted about 16 (out of 22) girls busy making the bracelets during their "free up" time.
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| she asked for colors to make a "rainbow" bracelet.... |
soon I noticed the girls had branched out and were making rings, and connecting the rings to their bracelets!
Near the end of camp we all tie dyed t-shirts to take home and to wear on our camp graduation day....
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| Peace Corps volunteer Abby and the girls from her village of Calibishie model their tie dyed shirts....we all wore our colorful tie dyed shirts to our graduation celebration. |
