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Thursday, June 6, 2013

Final Week of Summer Camp and GLOW Wave 1

We have come to the end of our summer camp and first group of GLOW girls. It's definitely a mixed bag of emotions. This week was rather difficult in some ways. First, on Tuesday very few children showed up to summer camp and GLOW had to be cancelled entirely. This is due to a number of reasons, the first being that it is wedding season. There is a season for weddings? Why yes there is! The auspicious time for a marriage in India is determined by the position of the sun and the moon. So all of the weddings happen in that prescribed time, which means there is a lot of traveling and family gatherings and such. This eventually translates into poor attendance at summer camp.

The other reason we had less kids in attendance is that they plain forgot. We last me with them on Thursday of last week, and it's hard to get them to remember to come back. There should have been more kids on Wednesday but our partner organization SAPID threw an environmental rally in our summer camp slum so everything was pushed to an hour later. Anytime the time is changed with something in India, that means a good amount of people won't show. We had a few kids but not as many as last week. It ended up being actually very good - the kids received more attention and more instruction. We went over English words for parts of the body (head, shoulders, knees, and toes etc.) and colors, numbers, and fruit. The kids had fun and so did we. GLOW was cancelled on Wednesday too because of the time change. On top of the time change the government schools started their new school year this week and neither SAPID nor our group knew about it, so a good chunk of kids were missing because of that. I was really sad that my project, GLOW, though scheduled for 6 days and 6 lessons only ended up having 3 days and 3 lessons, not due to anything that I did but mostly due to cultural issues and scheduling conflicts. Still, it was rather discouraging.

But we still had Thursday. And Thursday ended up being our best GLOW meeting. We taught the girls about menstruation, and our translator from SAPID, Urmi (the coolest woman you'll ever meet and our adopted Indian mom), was fantastic at explaining things where we fell short. I've never taught about menstruation before. I had to have Ben, our country director and resident health teacher, teach me how to teach it. That was an awkward but informative experience ha ha. I think Eric, who sat through Ben teaching us how to teach it, probably felt more awkward. It was pretty funny. But it went well with the girls, I think.

And then we taught them about self esteem. Julia took an apple and compared it to self esteem - when you think negative things, it's like dropping your apple and you get bruises. However, inside of every apple there is a star (then she cut the apple and showed them how the seeds made a star pattern). The girls loved it - they kept calling themselves super stars. And then we had them write in their journals things they liked about themselves. Annie asked if she could read what they wrote and many of them wrote that they wanted to help poor people. This was eye opening - they ARE poor, and they want to help others in their situation. I think I learn more from these girls than they will ever learn from me.

I hope what we taught them sticks with them. I think it was a wonderful way to wrap up our first wave of GLOW girls. We are going to try to get a new group each month to work with so we can help as many girls as possible.



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