By Tessa Davis | Program Director
Just Like My Child Foundation recently celebrated its first of three Camp Girl Powers scheduled for 2015. We had the great pleasure of hosting an East Africa representative of Global Giving at Camp Girl Power, Kelly Kurz who came to see The Girl Power Project in action first hand. It was a joy to have him participate!
The camp brought together 100 girls ages 10-15 from 9 area schools. These girls spent much of last year participating in Girl Power workshops that taught them the life skills necessary to avoid early pregnancy, early marriage and disease, so that they can live healthy lives and achieve their dreams!
Camp Girl Power provides a space for girls to demonstrate and celebrate their empowerment as well as build friendships and learn how to become mentors to other girls in their homes and communities. One way in which these girls learned mentoring skills and strategies at the camp was through role models who have already started to do this critical work. The camp was facilitated by a highly skilled girls club that is led by a superstar Girl Power graduate, Nabatenzi Joan. This club illustrated an exemplary model for how The Girl Power Project is designed to spread critical, life saving information through strong and skilled older girls mentoring younger girls. Watch the Girl Power Results video to learn more about this amazing group of girls.
This methodology is proving successful as is highlighted in the following quote from 14 year old camp participant Namiyange Jane. “I admired Joan so much! I want to be like her because she (Joan) talks about how she behaves and I know I can learn from that!"
The activities carried out at the camp event were all designed to help reinforce the training these girls have been recieving. One nail biting activity involved a group of girls lining up and tossing a clay pot to one another. The pot symbolized a girls life. Each throw of the pot represented a risky behavior, such as walking at night alone, accepting gifts from strangers, engaging in unprotected sex, etc. Inevitably the pot slips through a girls fingers and shatters into pieces on the ground. A girls life lost. The audience sighs loudly. It is heart breaking indeed. This activity becomes an important and interesting conversation starter. At first girls begin to blame one another for not being careful enough when throwing the pot. They don't want to take personal responsibility for their actions. This quickly shifts to personal blame for not paying close enough attention. Finally they conclude that the best strategy would have been to never risk throwing the pot in the first place.
The activity that seemed to win the best metaphor award however was the candle lighting ceremony that was held at night fall after girls gave testimony of how important Girl Power has been to their lives around a camp fire. The candle lighting ceremony involves mentors lighting the candles of other girls who were once in darkness, but who now have the burning light of information. The mentors encourage girls to continue to teach other girls the knowledge and skills they have gained through The Girl Power project with this inspiring activity. It has been very exciting for the entire Just Like My Child team to experience Camp Girl Power continue to evolve!
Just Like My Child Foundation has so much in store for The Girl Power Project in 2015, including piloting our system curriculum prototype in 5 new communities to ensure it is most effective and preparing to responsibly scale up to reach more girls. On behalf of the million girls we hope to reach through this project we wish to thank you for your ongoing support! We hope you will continue to follow our exciting progress!
We encourage you to click on all of the links we have provided and share not only our story and videos with others who may wish to get involved, but also your story! We would love to hear about why you are moved to support The Girl Power Project! Share your stories here and we will feature our favorite in our next Global Giving report!
We extend our utmost gratitude to our partners, The Collective Heart and Feminine Power whose commitment, love, and support have helped to make this project possible. We also wish to thank Kelly Kurz of Global Giving for trekking out to rural central Uganda to participate in camp! We welcome you back any time!
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