Our story so far, as I remember it...

The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace Corps.

July 07 - I mentioned to Otilia, the Red Cross volunteer coordinator in charge of a group of high school students, that I was interested in doing a summer camp. I was thinking about a GLOW and TOBE camp but I described it as being about things like healthy relationships, leadership, teamwork, communication, conflict resolution, life skills. Otilia was interested too.

Flash forward, it becomes apparent my volunteer neighbors in the village of Baru Mare as also interetested in doing a GLOW camp. The male-counterpart, TOBE, is catching on but is newer and more rare than GLOW, and ithe in-thing right now is to combine the two and have joint camps.

The GLOW manual mentions inviting former campers back as Junior Campers to help plan future camps and put those leadership skills to work. Somehow in my mind that morphed into "Let's have a high school camp in Deva where PCVs instruct the students in English, and then invite the high school students to apply to be volunteer-leaders at a second camp in Baru where they can teach the middle school students in Romanian."

It is important to understand the cultural attitude towards camp when you're planning one. In Romania summer camp is more like a vacation that the summer camps in the U.S. where kids are expected to show up for every event on the schedule. I wanted to give the high school kids ownership of the camp sessions so they would be motivated to attend. I also know that while they can speak English, most of the high school kids don't like to. I didn't think they'd be interested in coming to a camp if it was all in English like the drama camp I taught at last summer. The Red Cross volunteers are trained in Peer to Peer education and can instruct in First Aid. They also go into schools and lecture on AIDS and STD Prevention, Drug Prevention and Prevention of Human Trafficking. I asked Otilia if the volunteers would make presentations on these topics at camp.

January - Originally I envisioned both these camps as day-camps where the students ate at home and packed a lunch. I thought this would be cheaper since we'd only provide snacks and maybe a breakfast or dinner and wouldn't have to worry about where the campers would sleep. I wrote a proposal in Romanian to the Red Cross and my counterpart at my primary organization helped me correct it (rewrite it in Romanian so it made sense). Then one week I presented it to Otilia and we discussed the idea and we discussed the idea. Day-camp was thrown out. There's really no concept of day-camp here, so when I wrote the proposal I actually wrote "summer school but fun." Otilia also believed it was cheaper to have an overnight camp in tents and told me about free access to land. Many of my ideas for sessions and lesson plans were rejected. I asked Otilia what they wanted the Peace Corps volunteers to teach about and we settled on healthy relationships, conflict resolution, self esteem and leadership.

February/March -My friends in Baru and I, working with a school teacher and Peace Corps counterpart, wrote our proposal and submitted it to the GAD committee for the March meeting. There were two weekend trips to Baru where I paid my train fair in coins and we hashed out the details of the budget and proposal for funding our two camps. We hit a few snags, like my grossly overestimating the amount of money that was available for us to apply for, but in the end our project was funded for $1,000 U.S. for both camps. It's half of what we asked for but with a few adjustments camp can still happen.

Also the Mayor of Baru wasn't too keen on us having the Baru day-camp at the school, but he granted us access to land and is even going to ask the forest service to build us outhouses. At the last minute the proposal changed to reflect two camping in tents style camps. The Red Cross and the Baru Mayor's office have both agreed to do a lot for this project through in-kind donations and services such as use of land and donated transportation. For the Baru camp the Mayor has even promised us a cook to prepare the food at the camp site. We will be cooking the food the kids bring from their family gardens.

May - After months of being unable to reach Otilia we had our first meeting about camp in a long time on May 8th. It didn't help that I went on a vacation for a month and that she's only available one day a week. There were many rainy Fridays when I walked to the Red Cross office strongly suspecting that no one would be there to meet with me, but my tenacity forced me to go and see anyway. Why? It sounds cheesy but I was in alone in the drizzling rain I was proud to answer that question: because I'm a Peace Corps volunteer.

Otilia chose the dates for the Deva camp that were only four weeks away. Last week my PC training class had our Mid-Service Conference and I was able to have a meeting with some of the volunteers I invited to be instructors at the Deva camp.

Our next immediate order of business is to prepare a new budget showing how the camp will take place with the amount of money we were granted. We need to re-submitt the budget and and show written agreements between us and the Red Cross and the Mayor's office at the GAD meeting on June 7. There are so many balls in the air right now; budget, schedule, communication between partners and or course curriculum and activities. It's so exciting. So nerve-wracking. It's going to be great!