FINALLY! A post about our IGLOW camp in April. Enjoy!
To skip right to the video I made of our IGLOW click HERE. If you would like a little backstory to help understand our Master Plan then, by all means, read on!
First, a little background:
GLOW camps, as they were originally termed by the Peace Corps volunteers and their counterparts that came up with the idea, are weekend or week-long camps that connect youth with a larger community of activism and also engage them in informed, factual discussions about social or health issues that have usually never before been presented to them so fully or openly. The original GLOW camp (which stood for Girls Leading Our World) goes back to Romania 1995. Since 2012, when a group over in East Java held their first successful camp, us Peace Corps Indonesia volunteers have co-opted the name and added an "I" for Indonesia. Recently, some groups have decided to include boys in their camp as well, as we feel that boys and girls should both be present at the table when discussing issues pertaining their future. Thus, for our camp, IGLOW stood for Indonesian Generations Leading Our World.
The actual planning and execution of an IGLOW is a strange beast to manage. Planning is maybe 75% dealing with bureaucracy (from our schools and local ministries of education) and then juggling the schedules of speakers and our own different school schedules. We presented a very detailed proposal to our schools, which went through a revision at least once a week (and towards the end, once a day. Mind you, this nine page beauty was all in Indonesian and had to have all the requisite signatures and stamps of approval before we could even submit it to our local ministries to ask for permission and funds). We also attended other IGLOWS to work through issues facing our own. Once you're sure that everyone's agreed and actually wants the project to happen, then you come to the issue of fundraising. It took about four months for local donations to come through (covering only about a 20th of our final budget) and by that time we were panicking a little as to how to fund our camp. But money did come through in the end and our friends and family in America really blew us out of the water with their outpouring of support*.
I made a short video with the help of Dylan, Zoe and Jamie (my Peace Corps site mates and very awesome human beings in general) to show our finished product at the end of six crazy months. We all worked really hard to pull this off and are so proud of our students, who participated with such gusto! I think of all the projects I joined or undertook in the past two years, I grew the most during this one. Sadly, due to funds, space, and availability we were not able to invite ALL of our students but only 16 from each of our four schools. The point of IGLOW however, is to inspire our kids to be leaders, so it is fitting that they must now share their knowledge with the folks back home.
Before you watch it, here's some background on the sessions/organizations that will hopefully give a clearer picture of our IGLOW schedule as a whole:
The two environmental orgs that presented at our camp were Greeneration and World Wildlife Foundation.
All the speakers were very young (late teens, early twenties) and spoke passionately to our students about the value of activism and volunteerism. A lot of our students can still be seen wearing the panda pins on their backpacks around school. They also showed a cute video about man's destructive relationship with the environment and brought it all home by talking about Indonesia's unique biodiversity and environmental calamities, teaching our students how they could make a difference even in their own towns, by spreading awareness of man's very interdependent relationship with his environment.
In the combined session (showed in the video), the students first made lists (girls for the boys and boys for the girls) of the desirable or expected qualities of the opposite sex. Then the speaker went up to individual students and asked them if they could do specific activities (like for girls if they could lift something heavy) or if they could act a certain way (are men allowed to cry? to stay home from work while the wife earns the money?). The students response afterwards was generally positive and they seemed to realize through this activity that people can do all of these things but gender roles tell us we can't. One male student said afterwards that he knew there was a difference between sex and gender but before this session he wasn't sure what those terms applied to. When it came to talking about the third gender however, of which there are many in Indonesia but they are often met with ridicule and discrimination, the students' response was not so positive. One girl said during the session how she felt threatened walking by a transgendered person one time. The speaker asked her if she thought her memory of the incident was colored by her negative connotation with transgender people but she didn't respond.
To skip right to the video I made of our IGLOW click HERE. If you would like a little backstory to help understand our Master Plan then, by all means, read on!
First, a little background:
GLOW camps, as they were originally termed by the Peace Corps volunteers and their counterparts that came up with the idea, are weekend or week-long camps that connect youth with a larger community of activism and also engage them in informed, factual discussions about social or health issues that have usually never before been presented to them so fully or openly. The original GLOW camp (which stood for Girls Leading Our World) goes back to Romania 1995. Since 2012, when a group over in East Java held their first successful camp, us Peace Corps Indonesia volunteers have co-opted the name and added an "I" for Indonesia. Recently, some groups have decided to include boys in their camp as well, as we feel that boys and girls should both be present at the table when discussing issues pertaining their future. Thus, for our camp, IGLOW stood for Indonesian Generations Leading Our World.
The actual planning and execution of an IGLOW is a strange beast to manage. Planning is maybe 75% dealing with bureaucracy (from our schools and local ministries of education) and then juggling the schedules of speakers and our own different school schedules. We presented a very detailed proposal to our schools, which went through a revision at least once a week (and towards the end, once a day. Mind you, this nine page beauty was all in Indonesian and had to have all the requisite signatures and stamps of approval before we could even submit it to our local ministries to ask for permission and funds). We also attended other IGLOWS to work through issues facing our own. Once you're sure that everyone's agreed and actually wants the project to happen, then you come to the issue of fundraising. It took about four months for local donations to come through (covering only about a 20th of our final budget) and by that time we were panicking a little as to how to fund our camp. But money did come through in the end and our friends and family in America really blew us out of the water with their outpouring of support*.
I made a short video with the help of Dylan, Zoe and Jamie (my Peace Corps site mates and very awesome human beings in general) to show our finished product at the end of six crazy months. We all worked really hard to pull this off and are so proud of our students, who participated with such gusto! I think of all the projects I joined or undertook in the past two years, I grew the most during this one. Sadly, due to funds, space, and availability we were not able to invite ALL of our students but only 16 from each of our four schools. The point of IGLOW however, is to inspire our kids to be leaders, so it is fitting that they must now share their knowledge with the folks back home.
Before you watch it, here's some background on the sessions/organizations that will hopefully give a clearer picture of our IGLOW schedule as a whole:
The two environmental orgs that presented at our camp were Greeneration and World Wildlife Foundation.
Greeneration
Greeneration Indonesia's "core purpose focuses on encouraging society to have an eco-friendly attitude and to continuously improve, conserve and prevent the environment from further degradation." They run several projects such as the Plastic Bag Diet movement, which requires retailers to charge (a very small fee right now - they're working to increase it) the customer for plastic bags and Waste4Change, which helps businesses in Indonesia to become market leaders by thinking about the impact of their business on the environment. They have also made a series of animated movies with environmental messages for their educational outreach. If you want to read more about them (the website's in English but you might have to Google translate some parts) follow this link. For their session in our IGLOW the speaker mainly talked about the harmful effects of plastic bags on the environment and showed the students how to make a reusable bag from a T-shirt, as you can see in the video.World Wildlife Foundation
WWF is another awesome environment-focused organization, if you haven't already come across it before (recognizable worldwide by their panda logo). Their mission is to reduce human impact on nature and preserve biodiversity through public outreach, "facilitating multi-stakeholders efforts to preserve biodiversity & ecological processes on ecoregional scale" and by working at the policy level to protect these ecosystems.All the speakers were very young (late teens, early twenties) and spoke passionately to our students about the value of activism and volunteerism. A lot of our students can still be seen wearing the panda pins on their backpacks around school. They also showed a cute video about man's destructive relationship with the environment and brought it all home by talking about Indonesia's unique biodiversity and environmental calamities, teaching our students how they could make a difference even in their own towns, by spreading awareness of man's very interdependent relationship with his environment.
Laki-Laki Baru
...is an organization that goes into health clinics, schools, ministries, wherever they can and gets straight to the heart of issues like Islam and sexuality, cultural perceptions of masculinity, misconceptions about HIV/AIDS, transgender, sex education and more. They are on the frontlines of most of the social issues we as volunteers see every day and bravely start conversations with people who are very hesitant to have those conversations. Their website, which is in Indonesian, talks about how the holding back of one gender holds us all back. For our IGLOW, they presented two sessions - one geared towards boys and girls about gender roles and one just for the boys which dealt with how men can respond better to gender stereotypes.In the combined session (showed in the video), the students first made lists (girls for the boys and boys for the girls) of the desirable or expected qualities of the opposite sex. Then the speaker went up to individual students and asked them if they could do specific activities (like for girls if they could lift something heavy) or if they could act a certain way (are men allowed to cry? to stay home from work while the wife earns the money?). The students response afterwards was generally positive and they seemed to realize through this activity that people can do all of these things but gender roles tell us we can't. One male student said afterwards that he knew there was a difference between sex and gender but before this session he wasn't sure what those terms applied to. When it came to talking about the third gender however, of which there are many in Indonesia but they are often met with ridicule and discrimination, the students' response was not so positive. One girl said during the session how she felt threatened walking by a transgendered person one time. The speaker asked her if she thought her memory of the incident was colored by her negative connotation with transgender people but she didn't respond.
Samsara
We were quite nervous about inviting Samsara, an organization that often presents about sex education and puberty, to our IGLOW because of a negative response from other PCVs schools. Other PCVs have had mixed reactions with community members who were so offended by this session that they claimed it was an anti-Muslim camp after hearing that their students had learned about sex education for the first time. While Samsara does run some campaigns for safe abortions for women, they do not usually present about this at IGLOW camps, due to the controversial nature of the discussion. Several schools have even used controversial IGLOW sessions such as the ones Samsara allegedly gave as grounds for cancelling their contract with the volunteer. Needless to say, we asked Samsara if they would just provide simple education about puberty to our middle/high schoolers. These were supposed to be closed sessions to everyone, including us volunteers, but later our University counselors (10 students from a local University who volunteered to mentor our students throughout the camp) mentioned that they thought the information was a bit too "adult" for our 10-17 year old students. This was quite sobering for us to hear, as we believe that the students are basically watching their puberty go by without ever getting factual information about it. Usually in this culture, men and women learn about sex through porn or otherwise from misleading sources on the internet growing up and then come wedding night they might get a briefing from family or friends. Many many female students who become pregnant in school are forced to drop out due to pressure from their families and the school administration, yet there are generally very few consequences for their baby daddys in most cases.
The other organizations you will see in the video were several study abroad chapters such as AFS and YES, an Indonesia-specific program for high schoolers, two former Peace Corps employees who talked in a very relatable way about their experiences finding their calling in their careers (not shown was a man from a local car-making factory who spoke about job openings and work ethic) and a current regional manager in Peace Corps who talked about how to set goals.
That's it! Our schools seemed encouraged by the success of this year's IGLOW and we hope that they will do it again next year in some form or fashion. Sorry the video's a little long and not great quality.
The other organizations you will see in the video were several study abroad chapters such as AFS and YES, an Indonesia-specific program for high schoolers, two former Peace Corps employees who talked in a very relatable way about their experiences finding their calling in their careers (not shown was a man from a local car-making factory who spoke about job openings and work ethic) and a current regional manager in Peace Corps who talked about how to set goals.
That's it! Our schools seemed encouraged by the success of this year's IGLOW and we hope that they will do it again next year in some form or fashion. Sorry the video's a little long and not great quality.
Click here to enter our IGLOW camp and see for yourself what it looked like.
Brought to you by the Karawang Krew:
*Often volunteer-counterpart teams make a request to their school to use some of their activities budget to help with the cost of the camp, but we did not because we felt that we would be met with resistance from our schools if we did and we really just wanted the damn thing to happen.
*Often volunteer-counterpart teams make a request to their school to use some of their activities budget to help with the cost of the camp, but we did not because we felt that we would be met with resistance from our schools if we did and we really just wanted the damn thing to happen.
