Youth Business Camp

It's almost midnight and I'm still inputting budget items for our business camp. I like camp, but monitoring and budgeting is a pain and a half. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat though, to share more time with my favorite PCVs. Emily, Catherine, Asiha and I each brought four teenagers to Hotel Perkin Lenka for their first experience away from home at a camp covering themes including gender equality, customer service, self-esteem, facebook for business, entrepreneurship, discrimination and racism, competition, community needs, and I'm sure a few others that I have forgotten now that my brain is fried. The afternoons were filled with workshops on tie-dye, bracelets, soap-making, pie baking, and business interviews. Nighttime, as is the case with all camps, was when they all caught their second wind and were up playing soccer and being rowdy until all hours of the night, blank stares and glassy eyes safely tucked away to be pulled out in the next day's business sessions.

On the whole I thought the camp went well, though I would have liked more business activities and I definitely regret not doing a final session where they all identify their strengths and how they can turn those into business ideas. Thanks to Noah and the staff at Perkin Lenka, we got a fantastic chance to talk to adults about their jobs and their businesses, how they got started and their motivation. It was super cool for me, and I could see the wheels turning for some of the kids as well. I will say that, after having completed two camps with teenagers, I absolutely like teenage boys more than girls. I think it`s partly to do with my absolute non-interest in "girly" things, and partly to do with my complete impatience with the whole idea of "pena" and using it as an excuse not to answer questions, to hang at the back of the group, not to try in activities, to talk super quietly, and generally just have low self-confidence and no demonstrable skills whatsoever. Boys can be obnoxious and dense, but at least they are loud about it and know that at the end of the day, I'm the boss.

I'm not going to give a play-by-play of camp, but I hope you enjoy the pictures. The only part I really want to analyze was the after-dinner discussion we had about racism and discrimination. 

warm-up concentration exercises

my favorite pic of Emily at her first ever camp

awesome tie-dye

chair, backpack, baby - hilarious camp game

get your head in the game

making community maps 

Asiha's team

my team 

Emily's team

preparing to present after business interviews

look at that active listening!

the kid in the sunglasses was my favorite by far

camp crushing

after getting their diplomas

The racism and discrimination talk we had was one of the hardest I have ever done. It's already a tough subject, and with a group of girls who don't want to talk and boys who think their goal in life is to be the womanizing class clown, it was a rough hour. I think they mostly got the point when we talked about racism, though they were floored when Asiha explained that out of our group of four she has the deepest American roots. They were all in agreement that the color of your skin or where you are born doesn't determine your intelligence or personality. When discussion turned toward gender, that was when I started to lose them. I asked one of the boys how he would feel if someone called him "mujeriego," which essentially means womanizer, and he said he'd be thrilled because he'd be "more of a man." This is a thirteen-year-old. When one of the boys said homosexuals are lesser humans because they cry and are sensitive, I just about lost it. Apart from the absurdity of the idea that that has anything to do with sexual orientation, the underlying sentiment was exactly what we had spent the previous thirty minutes working to combat. I tried to turn the tables by asking him if he thinks women are worth less than him because they are more likely to show their feelings and cry, he wasn't even fazed. He nodded. nononononononono Are they even listening??? Will it sink in a week, a month, even a year down the line? Will he encounter enough strong, smart women that he is forced to change his tune?  Does that mean he thinks I am worth less?


The whole problem was exacerbated by the resolute silence of the girls in the group. They refuse to answer any questions unless specifically called on, and even then it's a one-word answer or an "I don't know." What do you mean you don't know? Were you completely spaced out for the entire day? It's as if they believe that if they are silent long enough, we will lose interest and call on someone else. (Suffice it to say the mixture of boys and girls makes for a wholly different camp vibe than the GLOW camp.) How has it become acceptable for children to think that a homosexual is not a man (we had a long discussion about the difference between sex and gender, and they still have this entrenched idea that homosexual means you want to be a women, are terrifyingly "other," and are therefore not a man), that women are "less than," and that different is bad? Young kids can be cruel in a basic way, but I seriously doubt that these views on gender norms with teenagers come from within. I know this is a machista society, but it's heartbreaking to see it in the young minds we are trying to shape into a better future for this poor country.


I don't mean to put a downer on camp, because it actually was a great experience for the kids and hopefully challenged their views and encouraged their creativity, but behavior change is so heartbreakingly slow. My best friends in my community are gay, and I wish so badly that things were different in this country for them. Why do we think we can make life miserable for others because they are different. I sure as hell don't understand the minds of girly girls obsessed with shopping and talking about how hot all of these random actors they've never met are, but that doesn't mean I should force them to see things my way and read a book rather than paint their nails. Their choices do me no harm, they open my eyes to new ideas and opinions, and I'm finding I even want to learn to dress up and get all stylish some days. Peace Corps is talking about opening this country to same-sex couples. It would be awesome to have role models and someone to talk to for gay youth, but it would be so horribly difficult and alienating here, especially since we have extremely restricted access to the capital, which is at least a little more liberal. Hard as it is to say, they're just not ready. It will take a lot more changing of hearts and minds, and I'm trying as hard as I can to plant as many seeds of change as possible.