Girls Camp!

Camp Geum Sa Bopp (Believe in Yourself) ended yesterday morning. I saw the girls back to village and then came immediately back to St. Louis to recuperate for 24 hours. It was an amazing (but exhausting) experience. We go through most of our lives Not paying attention to the FACT that women are still not given equal rights to men. I almost qualified that statement with “in some parts of the world,” but the fact is that even in America there is clear inequality in some contexts. It’s a difficult thing to face the reality of this inequality and associated hardship, more so when you feel incapable of doing anything about it. So, this past week was an emotionally charged oscillation between kin-tingling optimism and angry depression. But the knowledge that what we were doing must in some way add energy to the slow-changing situation here in Senegal kept us all pushing through the exhaustion.

Why do I say the situation here is already changing? I’ll give you, as an example, my very favorite moment from the week. It took place during one of the harder moments from the week, so let me explain. I was responsible for an activity to encourage the girls to look critically at gender roles. Tragically, critical thinking is not structurally encouraged here in the educational or social spheres. Education follows, pretty exclusively, a memorization and reproduction paradigm, and the culture is highly community focused, and people are expected to accept and conform to community standards without thinking for themselves about what seems right or wrong. This is an oversimplification, and I’m also casting it in a negative light when it has its advantages. However, for the purposes of the activity I led, it made things difficult. We started by doing an activity called “agree/disagree” where we read a series of statements to which the girls respond by taking a place in a line under signs that read “agree,” “somewhat agree,” “somewhat disagree,” and “disagree.” Responses encouraged conversation, at least between a few vocal people, about whether or not men and women had easier or harder lives and were more capable of working in business or not.

So, feeling optimistic, we split into small groups to continue discussing these issues and gender roles in general. Unfortunately, there was a misunderstanding between myself and one of the counterparts that led these discussions to be more school-type question-regurgitation-ish than critical thinking, open conversations. The girls were simply reproducing lists of traditional gender responsibilities and NOT talking about where these standards came from and how they were restrictive or supportive, reasonable or not, etc. In fact, when a friend of mine asked her group “where do these ideas about gender limitations come from?” Someone responded “God,” effectively ending all possible future explorations there. So when we asked two girls from each group to get up and summarize their group conversations, we were all freaking out a little. It seemed that rather than encouraging women’s freedom, we were enforcing traditional gender roles! We didn’t know what to do. We tried to ask them to talk about how they felt about the roles or what they thought about them, but it was like we hit a wall.

When the second group got up to read their list, I told them to skip over anything they had that had already been said, and to only say things that hadn’t already been covered. This group, with a wonderful young woman from my village leading the summary, skipped to question three, which was “Think about your grandmother, your mother, and yourself. How have gender roles changed over time?” What she said still gives me chills. She explained that her grandmother wasn’t allowed to speak in the home and was expected simply to do what she was told by the men of the house. That even her mother wasn’t allowed to make decisions about her own life, that she had to married to the man her family chose, and again had no voice in the home. But, she continued, her generation was the first to have a voice. They were allowed to speak their opinions in the home, to chose who they want to marry and reject those they don’t want. Silent all these years… … Okay, I will not cry in a public café… Saving grace. This activity was immediately followed by a talk with a Human Rights Jurist. She’s a Senegalese woman who has master’s degrees in human rights and international development. And there was nothing compromised in what she said.

Clearly parts of the camp were pretty heavy. And we were regularly reminded that these beautiful young girls, full of so much promise, lived in the same world we all do, where far too many women become victims of abuse. Sometimes it seems to me that innocence is dead. Then I see the smiles on the girls as they sing songs and drum along, when they saw the ocean for the first time, when they were just sitting around talking together, and I know nothing can kill LOVE. And I know that because of this camp, for one week, these girls were given a boost. They were given a chance to lighten their loads, they were given encouragement and knowledge of how to pursue what they want in their lives, they were given a community where it’s normal to be strong and intelligent, they played and laughed and sang and danced.

Meanwhile, we volunteers got to learn some really fun new camp songs and bond both with the girls from our villages and with some amazing Senegalese women,  a couple of whom I’d like to take home with me just to be present in my village. True role models.

It’s a bittersweet ending, as camps always are. You wish you could all stay, but you know you have to go back to your daily lives. You hope the lessons learned and the energy created persist in the campers’ lives, and you just have to trust that it will have some impact.

Finally, I just want to say again, THANK YOU to all our donors. You guys made this possible, and at least for me, this has been the most meaningful thing I've done for the people of Khatete so far. Please know that your support, both financial and in spirit was greatly appreciated, and truly made a difference. THANK YOU! I can't say it enough.