Last week, two HY volunteers in Mohale’s Hoek held a GLOW camp. GLOW stands for Girls Leading Our World, and it’s a multi-day leadership and empowerment camp for high school girls. My main job at this camp would be to teach a self-defense session. I decided to bring two of my Form C girls to be my “counterparts” for the session, and they could also attend the rest of the camp. A few weeks earlier, I told them about it and they had agreed to come, but several days before I was going to leave my village and help set up, they were unreachable. Keep in mind that this camp was scheduled during the school break, and many of my students left the village to stay with other relatives during that time. One of my students I was able to contact, but she told me that the other one was in South Africa at the time, so her Lesotho phone number wouldn’t even work when I tried to call. Long story short, I was finally able to contact both of them, and one of them was in the village the morning I left, so I met her at the taxi stop to coordinate and tell her what needed to happen for the camp, and how to get there the next day.
The morning of the first day of camp, a bunch of PCVs went to the host high school to set up in their big hall. I never realized how destitute and tiny my school was until I saw other schools like this in towns. That day turned out to be super cold, rainy, and slushy, and I learned that the taxis weren’t leaving out of my village because there was lots of snow in Quthing. This meant that I was lucky that I had left the day before, but that my 2 student counterparts would be one, if not two, days late to the camp. That afternoon, girls started showing up and we had introductory name games and activities. Our intrepid HYs had recruited 4 young women from the Mohale’s Hoek youth center to act as camp counsellors, and they were super awesome and enthusiastic. After dinner, the evening activity for the night was a dance party, which was really fun for all the girls and all of us volunteers too.
The next two days were full of sessions like sexual/reproductive anatomy and health, career planning and resume writing, contraceptives, healthy vs. unhealthy relationships, self-confidence and communication, knowing your rights and how to seek help with situations like rape and abuse, and HIV testing/counselling. Most were led by the counsellors and some were led by organizations like New Start (for the HIV stuff) or the police’s youth and gender protection unit. After getting stuck in some snow in Quthing, my two girls finally showed up. I was so happy they made it!
My self-defense session was one of the last sessions. My girls were champs helping explain the concepts in Sesotho and helping to demonstrate the moves. I had the girls partner up and do activities like being assertive with their body language and with their voice, and then practicing each move (modified, so they didn’t actually hurt each other) with a partner. They were all super into it, and I thought it was a success. One of the other volunteers told me afterward that if nothing else, if they forgot the specific moves, they got one message: fight.
The goal of this GLOW camp was to have each group of 3 girls from each school go back to their schools and start a GLOW club. Each school group of 3 girls and one of the teachers they brought sat down and decided how they would start their new club at school. I sat down with my two girls, and we determined that mayyyybe the other life skills teacher would agree to lead a GLOW club, but probably not, because none of the teachers at my school really care that much about anything, it seems like. They’re constantly absent, after all, and they don’t seem like the types to spend extra time outside of their teaching hours to help the students with something else. All this made our little group conversation very depressing, knowing that the self-defense lessons I’d been giving my girls probably wouldn’t evolve into anything lasting. After these meetings, we held a “graduation” ceremony (with the background music being Beyonce’s “Who run the world? Girls,” fittingly) where we gave the girls certificates and took their photo with their counsellor. Throughout the camp, from their enthusiasm expressing their opinions and asking questions during sessions, to the awesome singing and acting displayed at the camp talent show, I was continuously impressed, and it gave me a lot of hope that great things are coming for Lesotho in the near future because of girls like them.
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