Category Archives: camp BILD

10-26 Melsisi GLOW/BILD

Boys learning!

After going to the Training of Trainers camp on Ambae last year, we very much wanted to run the Camp GLOW/BILD (youth leadership: Girls Leading Our World/Boys In Leadership Development) at Melsisi.  It didn’t happen then for various reasons.  We started talking to the administration about it again at the beginning this year.  As the end of the year was approaching, we started pushing harder and finally made it happen.  Melsisi had a GLOW/BILD.

They LOVED tye dye.
These are some of my top year 10 girls.

We managed to place it over Constitution Day weekend so we had all day Friday and Saturday.  Sunday was first communion and Kastom dancing so we had to close before then.  Friday morning we gathered the kids and made introductions.  We introduced them to the first of the silly games we play and they rolled their eyes.  Then we broke up into boys and girls to start talking about leadership.  We followed that with communication and more silly games before breaking to have lunch.  The kids were sometimes a bit reluctant to talk at first (as always but even moreso with kids here.)  Even before lunch they were starting to open up a little more.  After lunch we did Tye Dye!!  Yes, we’re Peace Corps volunteers.  Once we showed them what was going on and how to do it, the kids loved it.  I tye dyed my Peace Corps shirt and then told some of the kids to tye dye my pants.  The shirt turned out well but the pants turned out even better!  We reined them in from tye dye to get a public speaking session in before time for sport.  Public Speaking is a skill which needs a lot of practice here.  My principal always rubs his hands over his face when he’s talking in meetings and many others have similar habits.  They’re a very shy people generally.  The kids were starting to open up more by this time and I was fairly impressed with their performances when we had them introduce each other in front of everyone.

The boys being saucy

Sport for the first day was Capture the Flag.  They don’t play it here so we had to explain the rules.  There ended up being confusion about many things such as where the line is and that you have to get the flag back to your side but they did understand that you have to run really fast.  They’re good at that.  Unfortunately, there was an injury during play.  Hannah (a volunteer from England) fell on her face running and broke her collar bone.  She ended up staying in our soon-to-be house before we did and is well on her way to recovered by now.   Gaea took her to the mini-hospital and helped her pack up to go to vila the next day while Paul (the other Brit), Al, and I got the kids started on making a camp banner and friendship bracelets.  Hannah and Gaea are the ones who know how to make friendship bracelets but were otherwise occupied.  This turned into me showing them how.  The upside of me showing it was that the boys were more okay with doing it themselves.  All the kids love chances to be creative so they had a lot of fun.

Trust falls!

Saturday morning we were back into it with a discussion on goal setting followed by a decision making game.  The decision making game starts by telling each participant that they have just finished year 8 and need to decide what they are going to do next: go back to the village, go to a Rural Training Center, let go school and try to find a job in vila, or finish secondary.  The work required for each of these is represented by physical exercises such as push-ups, sit-ups, jumping-jacks, or squats.  They then go to another station where they are presented with further choices to make for their “life” and given the exercises to perform.  Eventually they wind up in categories according to what role in society they play based on their choices.  It’s a really cool way to talk about life choices and the kids seem to get a lot out of it (other than just tired.)

Ultimate!!

After the decision making, I taught the kids a bit about budgeting and personal finance.  The basic things like how to record your incomes and expenses, how to identify wants that might be able to be eliminated, and the importance of paying yourself first to save money.  It’s a bit more academic so I hope the kids found it useful.  I know the one local teacher helping us did find it very useful.  We finished up the content with a session on trust and team building.  There’s a bit of talking about teams, why they’re important, and the role of trust.  Mainly we had the kids do trust falls.  Not those wimpy ones where you just lean back and one person standing behind you catches you still standing up.  We’re talking you stand on a platform and fall backward onto a line of people holding hands to catch you.  The boys loved it and some went multiple times.

To finish off the camp we scheduled a lot of fun time.  For afternoon sport we played Ultimate Frisbee.  I enjoy the game anyway but this was especially fun.  Once again we had to explain it to the kids and it took them a little bit to get but they really got into it.  My team took a little bit longer to get the strategy down but once they did, we dominated.  The best part was watching them get more and more willing to share the disc across genders.  My team especially was just passing it to whoever was open.  That is always my favorite part of these camps.  They are so good at breaking down the barriers and having them just interact as people.  When the game finished, we were going to let them go early for supper after a quick bananas dance.  However, they decided that wouldn’t do.  They asked to play each of the games we had showed them again.  This is another of my favorite parts of these camps.  When we first teach the games, they roll their eyes and don’t want to join in.  By the end of the camp, they’re begging for more.  After dinner we wrapped up with a slide show and video from Wan Smol Bag.  
Yeah GLOW/BILD!!

I am so glad we managed to get a camp run before leaving Melsisi.  They are an incredibly rewarding experience and I loved watching the kids gain confidence even through this short time period.  This goes double for the kids who have been in my class for the last couple years.  I was able to make more of a connection to them during those two days than I had been through two years of teaching.

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9-24 Mini Mini Summer Camp

Opening activity: switch ends of the board without
stepping off.  The girls did quite well, the boys needed a bit
more motivation.

Peace Corps has a few international programs, as in programs that all the countries do or use in some way. The biggest one seems to be youth leadership and development camps called Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) and Boys in Leadership Development (BILD). If you’ve been following the blog, you’ve read about two of these camps that I’ve been two on other islands. This time, it was our turn to run them.

Ideally, the camp should be a week long. Since nothing here has worked out in an ideal way, the first camp was only about 10 hours, broken up over three days. We needed to limit the participants, so we asked that all the student leaders come. That included the dorm captains, the class captains, the head boy and head girl and the prefects. We should have had about 50 but 10 or so weren’t back from break yet and a few more didn’t show. We finished day one with 38, which I thought was damn good. We finished the camp with 18, which was less good but still decent.
Turns out the English call Telephone “Chinese Whispers”

We started on Friday afternoon. We were supposed to start at 1:30 and sometime before 2:30, things did get going. We wanted to start of fun and make the kids want to come back, so we started with games. The students stood on a balance beam, shoulder-to-shoulder, and had to switch ends without stepping off. That worked pretty well, though the boys gave up until the girls started winning. Then we did a human knot. We used the games to show how leadership is important and talk about the qualities of a good leader. After they identify the qualities of a good leader, they have to identify a role model and say why that person is their role model. Then they identify qualities they already possess and qualities they want to improve on. When they were writing down the qualities they posses, they mostly got stuck. One of my co-leaders told them to look around the room and identify a leadership quality in each of the girls sitting near them. Then he pointed out that everyone had identified those qualities in each girl so everyone possesses some. I thought that was an excellent way of getting around the overly-humble mentality here and a positive self-esteem building statement.

Trust walk.  Yes, we took stairs.

After leadership comes communication. The communication games are a lot of fun. The first game the students each got a sticker on their back which they weren’t allowed to look at. Then, without speaking, they had to put themselves in groups. The first question after the game is, “What is communication?” To which they always say, “talking.” Then we think about the game and refine the answer. Again, the girls caught on fast and gave a good definition of communication in three tries. We settled on “sharing ideas.” Then we talked about who is responsible for good communication. The game to go with that is another of my favorites. In small groups, the students elect one person to draw while everyone else directs them. The directors go outside and look at a picture then come back and tell their artist what to draw. The catch is that the directors can’t use their hands and the artist can’t speak. Through that activity, they figure out that communication needs feedback, like questions and that speech alone isn’t very clear. I’ve noticed in doing that activity that the students who share a local language tend to do better than the ones using Bislama. Bislama is not a specific language and a lot is taken from context, including hand gestures and facial expressions. Of course, the boys got clever and used their noses to point instead of their hands. The girls just used local.

Everyone’s favorite game: Lion, Temptress, Hunter.
Rock, paper, scissors with the full body.

The next session is a bit more abstract. Trust and team building are hard concepts to convey even though everyone can recognize them. We talked about why trust is important in a leader and who we should trust. We also talked about how hard it is to get trust back once it is broken. Then we went on a trust walk. One girl was blindfolded while her partner lead her around the school. When the girls were panicking before hand, I asked what they were afraid of. A girl already wearing a blindfold said, “stairs.” That kind of humor is rare and shows how these girls really were a step above a lot of the youth I’ve worked with while living here.

After dinner, we watch a Wan Smol Bag video. The main idea of that was to give the students a reward for their hard work. It just happened to talk about STIs and responsible behavior and decision making at the same time. Usually, these camps have a sex ed component but we didn’t do that this time. I’ve nailed that one home enough around here, we thought it would be more productive to focus on leadership.
Due to their school schedules, we only had the evening on Saturday. We did an hour and a half of public speaking before dinner. Their practice for public speaking was to interview their friend and introduce her to the class. They had to stand up in front of the class without covering their mouths, looking at the floor, looking at the chalkboard, mumbling, giggling or running out the door. That was a challenge but they all did it and they did it rather well. It helped that the group was down to 8 by then, which made it less scary and they were the students regularly called on to lead evening devotions and make announcements in their classes.
After dinner, they had to organize a skit to do in church in the morning. The girls chose Moses leading the Israelites to freedom by parting the Red Sea. It took some prompting and some patience from me, but by the end of the night, they had taken control of their skit and were making plans. The light-bulb-of-success went off for me when they finished their rehearsals and were discussing what else they needed to do. One of the girls said, “We need an introduction.” Then they wrote an introduction. The same girl then said, “And we need a conclusion.” Their conclusion identified the qualities of a good leader that the story highlighted and explained why they chose that story. I was delighted with that but they kept going. Rather than making a dash off the stage, they decided they would sing a song first and then leave in a tidy line. They picked a song, set a time to rehearse in the morning. I was impressed.
Moses calling the Red Sea back together.

In church, they did their skit. Their voices were loud and clear. The only time we couldn’t hear them was when the audience was laughing too loud because the girl playing the pharoah was pretending to ride a horse, including the clop-clop sound effects. I was most impressed when they stayed for the song and did walk off the stage with their heads up in an orderly fashion.

I see the value in these camps in a way I never did as a teenager. At home, we role our eyes at “team building days” in the office or at school, but I’m coming around to them. There really is value in problem solving in an immediate sense and the sense of camaraderie that engenders. For the youth in Vanuatu, there is even more to be gained in self-confidence and supportive friendships. In the US, I never doubted that I was supposed to be confident in my self, even when I lacked that confidence. Here, it seems that the youth don’t have an idea of what a healthy ego looks like and these kinds of camps give them an opening to move towards it.
I hope all of that is true anyway. If not, it is fun to play the games.
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5-30 Adventures in Biting Plants

Nanglat: Stupid, Evil, Bitey Plant
Vanuatu has almost no plants or animals that are harmful to humans. There is exactly one sea snake with toxin strong enough to do serious damage and it can’t get its mouth open far enough to bite things bigger than your ear lobe. There is a shellfish that if you step on just right could do some serious damage, but they are uncommon and you really have to step on them. I can’t imagine being chased by a shellfish is a terribly frightening prospect. To add to this list, there is a single kind of plant that causes a rash and itching, like poison ivy. We pretty much don’t have any of these things on Pentecost.
While I was at the leadership camp, I decided to take the lead in something. Our toilet situation was less than stellar. The toilets themselves were the usual bush toilets, however the path to get to them resembled the contents of the toilet. Seriously, we had to walk about ten feet through ankle deep mud that smelled like rot. So, I decided to do something about it. I borrowed a bush knife and went to cut a bridge. By bridge, of course, I mean a couple of ankle-thick branches to put across the muddy part and use as a balancing beam.
I got the first one without trouble. I started walking back and spied a perfectly good sapling by the road. I set down the first sapling and started hacking away. Five minutes later, the sapling fell over into the bush. Not to be deterred, I went tromping into the bush after it.
I got about one whole step off the path before things started going wrong. Something itched on my leg. I kicked my leg around a bit to chase whatever bug it was off it and reached down to grab my hard-earned log. My hand closed on the log and the biting started on my arm. I pulled the log out. I was not going to be beaten by some pesky insect.
I stepped back onto the path and the burning started. I looked down, expecting to see black ants. They are annoying and painful but go away pretty quickly. Instead, I see nothing. Just my leg. Muttering curses, I picked up the logs and start walking back. The prickly itching feeling went from a mild annoyance to painful in about thirty seconds. I ran, dragging the blasted logs and a bush knife behind me.
I got to the poo-swamp and ran through it, leaving the logs behind. I got to the shower and started scrubbing. Like all poisons plants, the sap is the toxin and I wanted it off my skin. The girls found me there, dancing around in the shower swearing at myself for being an idiot, holding a bar of soap and a bush knife. They finished putting together the bridge.
I was leading three sessions that morning. I took a full dose of Benadryl and talked a little slower than I might normally do. I didn’t fall asleep in any session, nor did start drooling on my papers. I think I did surprisingly well given how much antihistamines knock me on my bum.
I’ve never had poison ivy. I’ve heard it is an acquired allergic reaction. I imagine this itched like that, except add in a burning feeling on contact. Even putting the sheet over my leg at night made it hurt. The next evening, it was mostly fine. The lingering effects of sensitivity to cold and water lasted another four days.
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5-30 Youth Leadership Camp, Part 2

Seriously, all I did was hold a banana.
The next day was HIV and healthy relationships. The coolest moment of the day for me was having a participant stand up and do a condom demo with me. She’s been through a peer educator training and is waiting for placement, but to stand up in front of a room of your peers and talk about condoms is hard for anyone, for her to do it and do a bang up job of it was just awesome to see. All I did was hold a banana.
Relationship jenga, building up and breaking down.
The GAD committee has been developing a few new sessions to try to make them interactive and more relevant. My favorite of the new sessions was Jenga. It works like this: Build half a tower. Read a statement about family relationships. Decide if it builds up or breaks down the relationship. For every build up, add a block; for every break down, take a block away. It allows the participants to discuss if they should be building or breaking with each statement. It has to be a communal decision because they don’t want the tower to fall. Eventually it does, and it is always a bad thing that sends it tumbling down, much like in life. The participants really got it and enjoyed the game as well.
Drawing her ideal partner
The last day of the camp the participants run their own mini-camp with local youth. Usually, we try to get kids between 8-13 to come be the guinnea pigs. This time, the participants told the PCVs to leave them alone to plan and execute the camp. Talk about leadership development! They ran a great camp and seemed to have a blast doing it.
Friday night was the talent show. A lot of times, these things are a bit drawn out, but I found myself more than entertained. They were a talented bunch of women and men. Some of them had more balls than me. Two women did solo musical shows, one young man was in about three different acts, and I think every participant did something. I helped my morning martial arts group put together a short bit, which went over well.
Friday was a late night, but totally worth it. It is a wonderful feeling to see the transformation in the youth from shy and unsure of themselves to the talent show. It is the same delight I get from coaching or volunteering during Mayday, the sense that this other mind just needs a spark to light amazing potential within them. It is weeks like this that I know why I am in Vanuatu.
The PCV crew from the week, with tie dye.
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5-30 Youth Leadership Camp aka What I did while Jason was being a Tourist

The first day welcoming committee.  (Photo by GAD)
While Jason was off gallivanting around Vanuatu with his mom, I was helping out at a youth leadership development camp. For those of you who have been following this blog for the last year, a lot of this is going to sound familiar. For the rest of you, here’s the quick overview.
Girls Leading Our World and Boys In Leadership Development are the gender specific camps. Last year, Jason and I went and brought a few people from our community. We did sessions about what makes a leader, good communication, healthy relationships, reproductive health, and decision making.
We turned the little boy into a man, at least on paper.
I went back this year. Due to budget cuts, the Gender and Development committee had to do a shortened camp with fewer participants. They laid the blanket rule that no one who had gone last year could go again and then broke it for a few of us. To keep their budget under control, we paid our own way. (Though later, they reimbursed us part of it.)
I took the ship over, which was an impressively uneventful trip. The only event was a last minute shipping schedule change that got me to the camp a day late. Luckily, friends pulled strings for me and I got out to the school at 11 pm and was greeted by a welcoming committee of sleep deprived and stressed out volunteers with big smiles.


Matching the body parts to their names.



The next day was the reproductive health day. I do a lot of reproductive health sessions. I talk about sex a lot. We went down to the water to do the sex talks in a more informal setting. They went really well. We get pretty well into it with the sex stuff. I think I started the day by saying that the penis one of the participants had drawn on the boy was insufficient. It set the right tone for sexual and reproductive health. We discussed menstruation, body changes, safer sex practices, STIs and sexual pleasure and that was just the morning sessions.
Natalie did every exercise with each participant that came to her.
In the afternoon, we played the decision making game. It’s like the choose your own adventure version of Life. The participants start at year 8, which is on the high end of average schooling here. From there, they make decisions about their life choices such as dropping out of school and looking for work, going to a GED program or continuing school. To progress to the next station, they have to do a certain number of exercises which represent the work it takes to get there. At every station they have the option of returning to their village and farming. That is only 10 jumping jacks. Going to work in Vila was 20 pushups, staying in school was 20 squats. The end is a race to see who can win a scholarship to China or Australia, which is a race across the football field and about 5 different exercises along the way. I think it gives them a strong metaphor for life choices and hard work impacting your eventually lifestyle.
That evening, it rained, which meant no tie dye. This is the Peace Corps. There must be tie dye. Instead, we made friendship bracelets and painted the camp banners. I taught a lot of friendship bracelets.



There must be tie dye.



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3-5 Fancy Party- PCV style



Hard at work, making things tasty

The Gender and Development Committee traditionally do a fundraiser during the trainings, at least the long trainings.  They usual do something like pasta dinner or a used-clothing sale and bring in 5,000-10,000 Vatu, or the equivalent of $500-$1000USD.  They aren’t huge but then again the projects they’ve been doing haven’t been huge.  This time is different.  The last few years have been focused on Camp GLOW/BILD, the leadership development camp we went to last May, but now they are trying to re-focus on more gender based issues such as the Gender Based Violence toolkit they’ve put together.  I’m testing it on Pentecost in the next few months, I’ll let you know how it goes.



They were arguing over the towel.
Anyway, they decided to throw a “Fancy Party” fundraiser instead of the usual pasta dinner.  They made four h’or devours type courses, two desserts and drinks and had a silent auction.  The food was good and the head chef was good enough to edit one of the courses to make it more vegetarian friendly.  There isn’t much you can do with sliders to make them vegetarian, though. 


She’s pretty cute.  And not afraid of me.
The silent auction was a great combination of practical items and silliness.  We had everything from a towel from Target, Cheetos from the US and toilet paper to USB drives and a box cutter.  It was fun to see what people are attracted to under what circumstances.  Here in the Peace Corps, some of the highest bids went to American items like the Cheetos and towel, which back in the US would probably be the least interesting things on the table. 


Cinderella! Wash the dishes!
The party was fun.  It was all PCVs and our new Country Director and new Administrative Officer.  The CD is married and has a very cute daughter who is not afraid of white people.  It was nice to play with a kid who isn’t afraid of me, confused by me and generally interacts the ways I know how to interact with kids.  She took a liking to my camera, which made her dad nervous.  I kept a firm grip on the strap while she was taking pictures, I don’t want to test the titanium casing on that thing.  


Head Chef Mat and a chunk of meat

We cleaned up and cleared out of the house we were partying in by 10 and went back to the hotel where we discovered that vodka can also be drunk out of a “shell.”  In some ways it is easier than a shot glass, really.  Maybe I’m just getting too good at drinking things from shells.



 It was a fun night and the fundraiser made four times what they were aiming for.  Hopefully this means the next year’s worth of camp GLOW/BILD will be fully funded and that we can laminate a few sets of pictures for the Gender Based Violence toolkits. 


Dessert!  Chocolate pudding with whip cream and chocolate pieces.
 I ate mine with a fork.
The committee hosts, after the hosting
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5-30 Kamp GLOW/BILD – What is it?

In the week before coming into Vila, Gaea and I went to Ambae to learn how to run a youth leadership camp. These camps are a Peace Corps wide thing but organized and run by different committees in each country. For the last four years the Gender and Development (GAD) committee in Vanuatu has run a Training of Trainers (ToT) for the new volunteers to get some experience running these camps. The participants in the ToT are individuals that the PCVs have identified as leaders in their communities. When they go back to the island, they are expected to work with their PCV to run a camp. GLOW stands for Girls Leading Our World and BILD stands for Boys in Leadership Development. They are often run in tandem with a few joint sessions and meals together but if resources are short, we can run them one at a time. The idea is to get youth between 12 and 18 to participate but we’ve heard of camps that included 9-year-olds and 25-year-olds. The length can vary from a two or three day weekend camp to a week-long one. We are hoping to do a week long GLOW/BILD combo camp at Melsisi and another one at Ranwadi.

The ToT was supposed to be a week long. We had a lot of sessions to do with them plus the added sessions on how to run a camp. Every day started with 6am sport for an hour. Then we’d bathe and go eat breakfast. The “academic” sessions started at 8:30am, at least theoretically. The first day of sessions start with talking about qualities of a leader and moved to good communication, including public speaking skills. We finish the academic sessions with another round of sport, usually things like capture the flag or Ultimate Frisbee. After dinner, is a more relaxed and social activity. The first day we played “props,” the game where you have a pile of objects and do improv skits to use them as another object while your teammates guess the object. The next day focuses on decision making and goal setting in the morning and trust and teamwork in the afternoon. The evening activity was watching a Wan Smol Bag (One Small Bag) movie and making friendship bracelets. (Wan Smol Bag does TV shows and movies about sexual and reproductive health. They tend to be really entertaining and educational.) The third day, we went down to the beach and talked about adolescent and reproductive health while roasting lunch then came back to the classroom to talk about HIV/AIDS and other STIs. That evening, we painted the camp banner and had a dance party in the dining hall. By dance party, I mean a few PCVs danced while everyone else watched or laughed. The fourth day we spent the morning on relationships before moving into the mini-camp planning. The participants planned the camp with almost no input from the PCVs. In the evening we relaxed around a fire and sang songs. The next day, the participants ran a mini camp for younger kids in the community. It was amazing to see how well they ran their camp and made us all very proud. The Camp wrapped up with awards and a talent show. We even got a few of the participants to join a martial arts demo as I had been running classes for morning exercises.

Leadership is really not something that gets talked about in this country. There is such a culture of shame around standing out in any way that it’s hard to be a leader here. From what we’ve seen, most of the leaders here have been either chosen for a position or “made the mistake” of putting a toe into a power vacuum and then get treated as a leader. Nobody talks about public speaking or non-verbal communication. Even for the well-educated teachers in the group, a lot of this seemed to be new concepts. Even less talked about is anything to do with sex and reproduction. I was very pleased to see how interested all the guys were, even when I went through how the menstrual cycle works. We had so many good questions that we dropped one of the planned activities to answer more. I got the impression that they were really excited to have a chance to ask about these things in a safe environment.

We are both very excited to go back and run our own camps. Hopefully we will also have opportunities to join other volunteers when they run their camps. We are both fully convinced that the week-long camp is the way to go. There are just too many topics that need to be covered to actually work in a weekend. We also want to create a safe space for questions, which didn’t start to happen until day three at this camp. After that they really opened up and were willing to ask about some touchy subjects. We had to use a question box to get some of them anonymously but that they were willing to ask at all is great. Watching our participants come out of their shells and gain confidence was awesome to watch. This definitely the kind of work we are both passionate about.

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Camp GLOW/BILD

Yesterday, we went to a camp GLOW/BILD. GLOW stands for Girls Leading Our World, but I don’t remember what BILD stands for. Boys In Leadership Development, maybe. Anyway, it is a camp for mid-teens where they learn about leadership, self-confidence, facts about drugs and sex and creative endeavors. The idea is to give teens the tools and information to navigate their rapidly changing world a little better.
I went to the camp because I was thinking I would like to run one during my time here. Now, I am certain I do. This camp was only a one day deal, they had the welcome on Friday night and the closing on Saturday night, but there are full camps where they have all the girls sleep together in one room for a week. For most of the girls, that is the first time they have slept away from their families their entire lives. In the longer camps, they can really dig into some of the facts of being a teen, things like body changes, STD/Is, safe sex practices, leadership qualities, communication skills, respectful behaviors and creative and athletic activities that build self-esteem and confidence. In the one-day version, there was less sex talk and more of the straightforward things. We spent a while discussing leadership and what makes a good leader, then we got into communication and public speaking. This is a big issue. Seriously, the culture here does not make for good public speaking. Culturally, you don’t look people in the eye while you talk or while they talk, you don’t speak loudly and you keep from pointing your body directly at someone else. Combine that with the very act of being a teen and you have some rough public speaking.
Each point was made with a game. The need for clear communication and not trusting rumors was made by playing telephone. The telephone was more difficult since it was all in Bislama when we Trainees only have three weeks of Bislama to help us out. Then the need to give clear directions was made by having every member in a group try to describe a photo to a single member to draw. That was funny. During midday, there was a talk about the facts and myths of Marijuana made fun by doing a relay race to put a statement in fact or myth columns. Finally, they sat down to make collages for a few hours then it was outside to play capture the flag in the cooler part of the evening.
All in all, I had fun being there and I’m glad I got to see it. I am certainly interested in running a camp during my service, and if I can use it to also promote some safe sex practices and talk about appropriate nutrition, all the better.

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