Hi everyone!! For the past month, I’ve been working on a project with my fellow volunteers called Camp LEAD. Camp LEAD stands for “Camp de l’environnement et alimentation pour demain” and focuses on teaching kids about health and agriculture topics. My camp occurred the last weekend of June, with the Camp in Fanning and Casey’s village the following weekend, and Krista’s village the weekend after that! Each camp spanned 3 days, with Health topics the first day (run by Fanning and Krista) and Agriculture topics the second day (run by Alec, Casey, and myself). The third day of each camp was devoted to a mural of some kind, a certificate ceremony, and screening of Black Panther in French. The whole experience was amazing, I learned a lot from the kids and from my fellow volunteers, and I had so much fun. While it was exhausting, it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my service thus far.

Each camp started with a reading of the camp rules, assigning teams, and going over the schedule. I have included lots of pictures from the camp in my village, and then some photos of my favorite moments from the other camps! The first day began with an amazing session by Fanning on first aid.

The average age of my kids were late teens, so they took to these concepts extremely well!

The next session was done by Krista, about STIs

We then moved on to the nutrition section of the morning, and the kids learned about balanced meals and drew examples of their “plates” in the notebooks we provided for them. After that, they went off to lunch!

After lunch,  we had a more hands-on activity about malaria. The kids take a soccer ball (representing a mosquito) and a bedsheet (the mosquito net) and play a game that demonstrates the importance of sleeping under a net every night.

The rest of the day was spent on a gender fishbowl activity, which encouraged the boys and girls to share their experiences and viewpoints of gender in their everyday lives, and is always a very interesting activity. After that, day 1 was over!

Day 2 began with Casey’s talk on Moringa trees, how to plant them and their nutritional benefits.

For those who do not know, moringa trees are considered to be a miracle tree because of the massive amount of nutrients contained in their leaves, which can be used to make a powder and put in many local foods. For this reason, it is a very popular project for PCVs in various countries. These trees, once grown, are also VERY resistant to drought, which is another reason for our promotion, as climate change leaves our rural communities the most susceptible to adverse environmental conditions.

We followed that session up with an activity on food security, where each kid got an identity card, and the information on that card impacted whether they took steps forward out of line (practicing integrated agriculture, having a fixed salary, being a farmer) or steps back (being female, illiterate, burning fields, having an illness, etc). This opened up to a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages in life and how/why they impact our forward progress.

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The last session of the morning was mine, and I discussed soil fertility and composting! I added a slideshow of pictures of me teaching, mostly for my parents, since they’ve never seen me do a session in french on dirt (and never will!) I then followed this up with a small activity where each team made a mini composter with a plastic bottle.

After lunch, Alec took over with a session on natural insecticides. This session promotes the use of nonchemical and affordable options for insecticides that can be used on a small home garden and the kids loved it! Materials include hot peppers, onions, soap, and more!

The very last day in my village we painted a mural on my Elementary School that promotes Moringa and is a visual representation of its nutritional properties!

After working on the mural during the day, we had the ceremony!

All in all Camp LEAD in my village could not have gone better! We learned a lot from our first camp and were able to take what we learned and apply it to the second camp in Casey and Fanning’s village! This was a similar size to my camp (22 kids) but the age range was younger, which was a nice new experience!

The mural in the second village was a map of the world! The kids got it done veeeeery fast (too fast, lots of drips!) but they had fun. We fixed it up and it was good to go!

The final camp was Krista’s!

So at the end of each agriculture day, Casey taught a yoga class! The best pictures are from the last camp so I put some in here as a closer for this post. The kids had fun in each village and I know it was a favorite for us volunteers.

I think Casey and I loved the yoga activity a lot for the same reason I love to jog in village. It gave us a chance to demonstrate that woman are strong and capable of “doing sport”. After a long weekend of airing out sexist cultural gender norms, it was nice to see the boys struggling to do poses that Casey and I (although more Casey in all fairness!) did with ease. You could see the kids having to reevaluate their ideas of what yoga was and go from viewing it as “easy” to something that takes practice, strength, and determination, but can be done by anyone with enough hard work! After painting a banner for the health center on mosquito nets and the ceremony, our last camp came to an end! I could hardly believe that 3 weeks and 3 camps had already come and gone! I think it went by so quickly and smoothly because of all the initial work and organizing we did as a group before the camps even began, as well as uncompromising teamwork and great counterparts day in and day out. I mean it when I say that the camps would not have been as successful without such an amazing group of volunteers. I truly believe that PC work really shines when we are able to collaborate, work to our strengths, and impact as many people as possible by combining forces. One volunteer could not have held a 3-day camp in 3 villages for 60 odd students. It was truly an honor to learn and grow so much along with Alec, Casey, Fanning, Krista, and all of our great counterparts! I hope that this camp, which has been done in other PCV countries with great success, can be continued with the next volunteers in our villages, and in other parts of Cameroon as well!

Well, that’s it for me! Camp has really been the majority of my last month or so, but I hope to have a few more updates on work and general life before Close of Service in November. But, for now, see yeeso and au revoir!