Camp BILT Write-Up

Peace Corps Suriname is proud to announce the successful completion of its sixth youth development camp based on the Camp GLOW model.  Over the past two years, Peace Corps Volunteers have worked with over 200 students and local mentors to bring life skills education, youth empowerment, and HIV/AIDS prevention education to underserved populations around Suriname.  These local leaders have carried the camps’ lessons back to dozens of communities and spread them through youth clubs, school activities, and other community education events.  The offering has improved with each camp, in terms of impact and sustainability, as organizers strive to put more responsibility on community partners, include more local mentors, and reach a broader pool of communities and students.  With our post soon closing, we are now working to push this evolution to the next stage – completely handing off a strong, durably youth development concept to local partners.

The latest camp, held May 18-21, continued this process.  It was also the second youth camp to include our biggest change yet: applying the GLOW model to boys.  Camp BILT (Boys Improving Lives Together) brought together 30 boys and seven local male mentors from some of the villages furthest south on the Gran Rio and Upper Suriname River.  While Camp GLOW in Suriname remains focused on female empowerment and HIV/AIDS prevention education, Camp BILT has adapted the message for boys to focus more on personal responsibility and teamwork.  This most recent camp also included several structural modifications from our other camps, generating significant positive feedback from campers, local partners, and Volunteers assisting with the event.

One of the most impactful changes was an explicit focus on the camp’s theme of leadership, responsibility, and teamwork.  This was illustrated by the camp motto, “Na wan kodo maun sa hai boto, subi dan.” (One hand alone cannot pull the boat through the rapids.)  The lessons – leadership, environmental protection, drugs and alcohol, careers and goal setting, HIV/AIDS prevention, and life decisions – educated students about how these characteristics support positive outcomes in many different arenas and offered opportunities to practice their skills.  At the same time, the camp was organized to allow explicit and implicit tie-ins to that theme each day.  The capstone was a daily closing ceremony that brought the boys, as one large community, physically together to silently consider how they could become better leaders using the lessons of the day and the opportunities coming up the following morning. 

To further support the theme, Camp BILT gave the children more responsibility for themselves and each other in the camp’s team structure.  The camp still divided students into teams for lessons, activities, and trust-building activities, with local adults and Volunteers assigned to guide each team, but asked the children to take on the bulk of team leadership responsibilities.  Two “kid captains” each day were responsible for assisting adults with keeping their team in order and supporting lessons. All children were given the opportunity to be a captain and constantly reminded of the leadership challenge issued on the first day – be a leader who takes responsibility not just for yourself, but for those around you. 

Camp BILT also continued the trend towards greater local partner involvement, a critical piece of any sustainable project.  Every lesson was planned and executed in partnership with a local mentor, increasing ownership for the host country nationals involved and providing strong role models for the boys to see standing at the head of the class.  Local mentors also slept in the cabins with the boys, taking responsibility for discipline and nightly de-briefs with the boys to help them digest the camp and generate feedback.  This increased bonding between mentors and boys, while leaving Peace Corps Volunteers free to focus on organizational and logistics preparation, as well as keeping energy levels high.

Between the constant evolution from camp to camp and the underlying strength of the Camp GLOW model, youth development camps are a shining success story for Peace Corps in Suriname.  This type of investment in the youth of the interior is unique to Peace Corps and offers children and adults a look at a type of education they otherwise never see.  As our post nears closing, however, the organization faces the same challenge that Camp BILT put to the boys every day – how can we make the lessons learned take root in communities to flourish and spread on their own? 

Peace Corps Suriname is working with community partners as well as the government to hand off parts of what the Camp GLOW model has to offer to youth in the interior, but there is no simple solution.  We depend on the diverse group of Volunteers and their local partners to look constantly for more ways to transmit the knowledge and excitement that comes from these camps.

Here for pictures.

Peace Corps Professional

Gentle Readers,

You didn't think I would forget, did you?  An elephant, never forgets.  Of course, that has nothing to do with me since I am not an elephant, but it's still a good saying.  I guess.  Maybe elephants disagree?

Anyway, hi!  It has been a raucous couple of weeks, let me tell you!  Seriously, there has been some serious Peace Corpsing going on down here with yours truly.  I'm mostly going to talk about Camp BILT, but before that let me just talk about my Lampesi project, briefly.

Lampesi - the stairs down to the river where people go to wash, land boats, etc.  It's culturally and logistically a central, important chunk of infrastructure in the village.

I've been trying to get money to build one forever.  Interesting developments - may have found a company to give us the cement.  MORE interesting developments - may have found an organization that wants to help us build a floating one!  It's with a Suriname Lions Club - does anybody know any local Lions Clubs?  Did anybody realize how many international-ish service-ish vaguely-rich-people clubs there are out there?  It's actually pretty cool - and they are dragging their feet a bit, but it could be super cool.

The problem with cement lampesi's are that they are expensive, not exactly green friendly (though they do help prevent erosion), and generally require at least some outside assistance and some major inside organization and commitment.  Wood lampesi's are quick, local, and easy.  Of course, they only last a couple of years.  So it's kinda two different theories of sustainable.

The reason that wood ones don't last, I'm told, is because the water level keeps changing.  If they were always above or always below the waterline - and made with the proper woods instead of whatever is lynig around - they should last a mad long time.  If Lions Club decides to help us at all, it will be to make a floating one.  There are some cultural barriers there - wood lampesi's are viewed as low class and there are NO floating lampesi's on the river.  But it's also an awesome opportunity - we could have the first floating dock on the river!

If either the Lions or the village decide they don't want to go that route, I will most likely right a Peace Corps Partnership Project (PCPP) - that means I ask the internet (and thus you, sorry) for money.  It's essentially an opensource grant request.  That is less than ideal for several reasons - I have to ask my friends for money and it does nothing to improve the village's access to local, sustainable project-oriented resources.  On the other hand, if I can't find another possible local funder - at least the village would end up with a lampesi.  That is a durable piece of infrastructure and the community organization required to build it would make for a strong model to sustain into the future - making future projects more likely. 

So yeah, we will see what happens!

Now...on to Camp BILT!  Boys Improving Lives Together (guess who came up with that.  yup.)  Man that camp went well.  It was a giant success, really just giant.  I couldn't be more happy with it, to be honest.  There were a lot of un-anticipatable challenges but the team just rolled with them and kept making it happen - and with a smile, which is all the difference when you are doing it in front of an audience of impressionable 12-19 year old boys.  I'm going to write a bit more about it from a personal view, here, but then I'll include a write up we were asked to do about it for a seminar involving other Peace Corps posts that do similar activities.

BILT was exactly what I hoped it would be and it was exactly what I like doing.  I got organized, carried the money, and ran around putting out fires and keeping a complex group of 30 boys and almost 30 adults moving towards the same goal.  It was that really good, gritty leadership, management, and motivation stuff that I just plain like - all set in the context of really making a difference in people's lives.  Basically, it's what I want to figure out a way to get paid to do.  Maybe not running youth camps specifically, but that basic concept. 

I'm in no way taking entire credit for it - we were a three person committee and it really did take all of us - but the camp was almost a text book case study in effective management.  Stuff keep trying to go wrong, but because we had a well defined planned, a clear overall vision, and sufficient buffer for a resources (the most important being volunteer motivation, which meant planning ways to boost it as needed) - we were able to swallow them all without stumbling.  So I'm really happy with it, and everyone I've talked to was as well.  A few of the more experience Volunteers who have previously planned and ran camps - and who were instrumental in helping us plan and run ours - were among the most complimentary.  And those are the ones that meant the most, since they really know what they are talking about.

So, all in all, not a bad couple of months work.  I'd probably even be willing to do it again...after a bit of a break.  That document I mentioned is the follow up post.