Hello World!: Camp Glow

The volunteers in my province hosted a weekend long camp for our female students to help provide an empowering experience. We teamed up with other local NGO's that provided presentations for our your 73 young students in areas such as future finance planning, problem solving, setting goals, gender equality in Cambodia, their judicial rights, career assessments and self defense. We even had some Peace Corps leaders who are from Cambodia come to our camp to be our guest speakers and spoke to the girls about career choices and being able to balance their profession and their family. Many women in Cambodia do not receive a lot of moral support to go off and freely choose their own career path. Instead, they are discouraged to pursue their dreams and are often forced into marriage that leads them to having children and not being able to follow it with continuing their education or work. Hopefully, these camps can help encourage and motivate our students to believe in themselves and to believe that they can be true leaders for their families, their communities and for the rest of Cambodia.

The girls did a self portrait activity where they had to also write five things that they like about themselves. Then they taped it to the walls where other students were encouraged to also write positive statements.

Mary was one of the presenters from KAPE. This woman is so inspiring and is a big ball of positive energy. After speaking with her she gets me motivated and pumped to want to do so many projects with my students. I know that the girls from our camp look up to her and admire her for being such a strong Khmer woman. She definitely is one of my heroes.

Mr. Sovat, from the ADHOC human rights organization talked to the girls about their rights in Cambodia but a lot of times, people in Cambodia are not educated with the laws in Cambodia and don't exactly know which rights they do have.

One of the volunteers, Megan did an awesome presentation with her counterpart about creating an identity map. This activity helped the girls list and define how they view beauty, gender, culture and careers in Cambodia. They were then encouraged to incorporate their thoughts and views by drawing shoes.