BUILDing it Up!

December 4th through the 11th marked the first annual Camp BUILD and second annual Camp GLOW in Uganda. BUILD is an acronym that stands for Boys of Uganda In Leadership Development. And that's exactly what it was, a leadership camp. The female counterpart was GLOW or Girls Leading Our World.

I had the rewarding opportunity to participate in Camp BUILD as a counselor. This meant that I, along with my Ugandan counterpart Lewis, was responsible for leading a team of 10 adolescent males from all different parts of Uganda. The camp consisted of about 150 Ugandan boys nominated by different PCVs throughout Uganda. They were selected based on their academic performance and leadership potential, as witnessed by the PCVs in their respective villages.

The idea was to spend one week with these boys, arming them with the tools and knowledge to be better leaders, and then bring that knowledge and those leadership skills home to their villages and share it with their communities. This experience turned out to be one of the most rewarding and fun weeks of my Peace Corps service. I'm so happy I did it.

Another great thing was that I was able to send six boys and four girls to the respective camps from my village. So they can bring this back home to our school and their villages when all is said and done.

Each day the teams participated in sessions on personal health, conflict resolution, communication, water & sanitation, environmental stewardship, and many others. The idea was that we were BUILDING each one of these areas in Uganda's male youth.

BUILD yourself

BUILD your community

BUILD your health

BUILD your environment

BUILD Uganda

By far my favorite parts of the week were sitting down with my boys and discussing these topics after each session. Together, with my amazing counterpart Lewis, we would sit down and review the important concepts of each topic discussed.

On the second evening, we invited a local drama production to come and do some performances for us. We invited the girls from Camp GLOW over to the BUILD side. The drama had to do with domestic violence and women's rights in the home. The event turned out to be little short of a complete disaster. With the boys pitted against the girls on every little action that took place. The boys erupting in cheers and applause when the man in the play pretended to beat the woman or rape her. While the girls screamed and clapped every time the woman stood up for herself (a good thing).

Needless to say it was not our intent to spur such a competitive and primitive exchange between the two sexes. But what was a great thing to come out of it was the opportunity to sit down the next morning and discuss with our teams what had happened the night before. The opportunity to address these issues face to face with these boys. These are very serious issues and can often times be buried or masked in everyday Ugandan life. Domestic violence and sexual abuse is a huge problem here. And many times it just isn't talked about. The events of that evening exposed just how serious the problem was.

Sitting down and having this discussion with my boys was incredible. Of course none of them admitted that they actually thought domestic violence or sexual abuse was right. And maybe they were telling the truth. I personally think they were. But you can never know. But just to have the opportunity to sit down and motivate and inspire these young men to do better was transcending.

"You, as young men in your communities, have to decide today what kind of leaders you are going to become. Are you going to be a man who accepts and promotes domestic violence in his home? Who rapes his wife? Who beats his children? Or are you going to build a home based on mutual love, respect, and honesty."

Whether these words fell on deaf ears or whether they truly hit home will never be known. But to be a small part in these boys development was more than I needed to feel absolutely thrilled for the week.

And just the small, day-to-day interactions with my boys were awesome as well. The opportunity to encourage them in everything that they did and love on them in a way they hardly ever get in a country where kids are often times treated as second class citizens is by far one of the best things about the week and my service.

At the end I got to participate in a leadership session where we gave a similar talk to all the boys which capped off the week pretty well. You can check out the camp's website at campbuilduganda.blogspot.com. There should be one or two pictures of me floating around on that site (look for the maroon t-shirt).