GLOW Camp Muhanga - This Time, No Bedbugs!

Hey, all!  It has been a busy, busy month.  Three weeks ago, my parents visited me for a second tour of Rwanda.  After they went home, I had one day at site before traveling out to Byimana in Muhanga District to set up a GLOW Camp.  You may remember my posts about GLOW Camp in Bugesera last year.  Well, this year I did GLOW again, but as an administrator.  And guess what I found out? Being an administrator is a lot of work!  I’m exhausted, but helping manage this thing was a perfect culmination to my Peace Corps service.  I learned a ton, and now I can say I had a hand in planning one really successful GLOW Camp, the first ever GLOW Camp Muhanga.

Am I proud?  You bet I am!  But more than that, I’m in awe of just how well things came together.  We owe it in no small part to Pamela, a PCV who works with EDC in Kigali. When Pamela approached me five-ish months ago and asked if I wanted to help put together a GLOW Camp I said yes somewhat reluctantly, not because I didn’t want to do it, but because I had no idea what it would take and I wasn’t sure we could do it.  

Over the months that followed I worked with Pam almost entirely through email to plan activities and lessons for the camp while she met with other volunteers to prepare a site for our camp, apply for funding, recruit campers and facilitators and get materials together.  Thanks entirely to Pam’s diligence, our PEPFAR grant came through on time.  Meanwhile I worked up an elaborate schedule of lesson rotations that looked beautiful on paper but that I suspected might lead to a practical disaster.  We also temporarily lost our venue for the camp and had to quickly find alternative dates that worked for all the facilitators.  The two weeks prior to the camp I continued to correspond with Pam about last-minute programming details while on vacation with my parents.  When I finally arrived at the site last Wednesday, it hadn’t hit home yet that it was all actually happening. 

Then the facilitators arrived and next thing I knew I was running all-day facilitator training sessions.  And that’s when it finally hit home.

Apparently ours was an exceptionally well-organized GLOW Camp.  It didn’t feel that way from the administrative side.  I constantly had to resist the urge to run interference when things were already going really well.  Unplanned spaces in the schedule that initially gave me heart palpitations turned out to be golden opportunities.  One night we had a game of trivia that one of the facilitators planned out that same day – question categories included America, Rwanda, music and potatoes.  Another night at dinner we tried to teach the campers how to play the cup game and the rhythmic slamming of cups on tables led to some wild impromptu dancing.  Another day we taught the campers how to play Big Booty, and they taught us how to play a game called Water-Land, where you jump into the circle when the leader yells “Water!” and out of the circle when the leader yells “Land!”  The planned activities were incredibly successful too, but if we had had an unexpected disaster – if we’d forgotten materials for the lessons or if our Outward Bound instructors had blown a flat tire or if all of our sports equipment had somehow gone missing, or some equivalent calamity – we still would’ve had a successful camp.  The combined energies of the campers and the facilitators were just that incredible.

I have a ton of stories to share about inspirational things the girls did and said, about minor crises and victories, about running around an auditorium trying to catch frogs, about fishing basketballs out of piles of pig excrement, and a gazillion other little Peace Corps moments that made this past week the hardest and best week of my service.  But it’s only been a day – I can’t think of any of them now.  School starts on Monday but as the weeks progress I’ll try to share little stories from GLOW Camp as they come to me.  I’m not done yet, but I can already tell that this was the perfect resolution to a wonderful two years of service.

Me with the campers from Gihara - Henriette, Odette, Laurence and Rose