Camp Etoiles du Nord

This past week, the Mango girls’ camp that I had been planning since March, with other volunteers in my prefecture, took place. The camp was held for 30 female students entering into 3eme, the U.S. equivalent of freshmen year of high school, who were the top female students in their classes. The girls ranged from 14-19 years old. It’s common to have girls still in middle school who are 17 or 18 years old since failing and retaking classes occurs so often. We took girls from the Oti prefecture that encompasses the lower section of the Savannes region and has one of the lowest rates of girls’ education in the country. The girls came from 20 villages, ranging from Mango itself to villages 2 hours away. The goal of the camp was to empower the girls and motivate them to stay in school by opening their eyes to opportunities beyond their villages.

As you can imagine, planning and running a summer camp in Togo is a lot different from running a camp in the U.S. To contact the girls and provide them with information, we had to travel to their different villages by bike, moto, and bush taxi to see them in person and make sure they understood all the camp details. This took a lot of time and I think we were all wishing we could just email out an invite and wait for an emailed confirmation in return. In preparing camp documents, printing, and photocopying, we had to travel to Dapaong and to buy things like folders, nametags, and pens in bulk we went on a 10 hour trip to Lome. What would take a quick trip to Kinkos and a few “purchase” clicks on a school supply website in the U.S. took many days and lots of uncomfortable road trips in Togo.

Another time-consuming issue came about while we were preparing the camp location. We used a room at the local CEG (like a middle school) for the camp sessions and while preparing the site, we came across the almost always unpleasant issue of latrines. Since we wanted to practice the health behavior that we always preach and have all campers use a latrine instead of the great outdoors, we had to make sure that there were latrines available for use. I was given the fun duty of figuring out this latrine situation. Upon arrival, the CEG director informed me that the latrines had been locked for the summer with fancy bars across the doors and that a parent group had the key. Apparently, the school had to upgrade to having metal bars across the doors because the normal locks had been broken multiple times by local people who wanted access to the latrines. Since there are only 6 latrines for a school with about 1000 students, they don’t want random people using the latrine all summer because they will fill up faster. Anyways, after we obtained the keys, there was the issue of used toilet paper. The CEG director was away the last week of school, so he hadn’t been able to oversee the usual end of the year latrine clean-up by the students. In Togo, since schools can’t afford to pay for things like janitors, it’s the students who are made to do all the cleaning. Because no cleaning had occurred, the latrines were filled with used toilet paper. No students were around, so I paid someone to come clean out the latrines while the director and I oversaw the burning of the used paper. Throughout the ordeal, I was laughing to myself imagining a school director in the States being asked to oversee this type of issue.

A couple weeks before camp, we came across two more road bumps. The first was when we came to the realization that we had planned the camp during Ramadan. This meant that about 1/3 of our campers were fasting during camp. We had to provide meals at different times and rearrange the timing of some activities around prayer. Additionally, many girls were nodding off and unable to focus during sessions. However, I can’t really blame them, as I’m sure I would have trouble focusing if I were not eating or drinking water from dawn to dusk. A second road bump came when we found out one of the girls we had chosen for camp had a 3 month old baby. Since she had managed to be one of the best female students in her grade throughout her pregnancy and right after she gave birth, we didn’t want to discourage her by telling her she couldn’t come to camp because of her baby. The girl proposed a solution by saying she’d just bring along a 9 year-old in the family to take care of her baby while she was in sessions. While a 9 year-old might seem a little young to be caring for an infant, in Togo, as soon as a girl is big enough to carry a baby on her back without falling over, she’s old enough to take care of a younger child.

Despite lots of expected, yet unforeseen, setbacks, camp went really, really well. Many of the girls had never been to Mango before, so it was their first time being in a larger town. We had a whole variety of sessions from self-confidence to setting objectives to reproductive health and we did all the usual camp things like singing songs and dancing. We brought some American camp traditions like the campfire and marshmellow roasting. When we brought out the marshmellows, one girl was very concerned and she kept saying, “are you SURE it’s not cheese?” Three activities that really interested the girls were a computer session, a site visit to the local hospital, and a visit to the local radio station. During the computer session, many girls saw and touched a computer for the first time. They were so excited to learn, but it was a slow process to teach them how to do something simple like open word, write their name, and save the document. Back home computer use has become such an expected skill, which you assume everyone possesses, that I had forgotten how unnatural using a mouse and typing on a keyboard really is in the beginning. At the site visit to the local hospital, the girls got a tour of the facility and met nurses and doctors. By chance, an operation was happening when we arrived at the operating room. There was a small boy on the table about to be cut open, but that didn’t stop the tour, the surgeon opened the door and let all the girls look inside, which I’m sure does not meet the necessary standards of sanitation for surgery! Needless to say, I was glad to know I would never be operated on at that hospital. For the visit to the radio station, each girl got to talk for a second on the radio and give her name and say a little about herself. The room was air-conditioned and it was funny to see the reactions of the girls who probably had never felt air-conditioning before.

All the sessions and site visits were great, but what I enjoyed the most, and think were the most important, were the conversations with model women. We invited professional women who work in Mango, ranging from a police officer to teachers to a nurse to an engineer, to come share their experiences. We also had female university students, attending one of Togo’s 2 universities, who had grown up in the Oti prefecture serve as camp counselors. It’s easy for me to tell Togolese girls that they can have an independent career and a life beyond their village if they work hard and stay in school, but since I come from a privileged background filled with opportunity, I have no experience to back-up what I say. Many of the professional women we had talk came from poor families in villages and surmounted the same obstacles the girls currently face. Having the university girls was especially important, because they actually came from the same villages as many of our campers. Many of the women had common stories of having to balance the household demands of cooking and cleaning with school work, having to sell something small like bread or fruit to help pay for school, and almost all had been sexual harassed by a male teacher at some point along the way who wanted to exchange sex for better grades. Unfortunately, this last problem is a major issue in Togo and it’s all too common for girls to get pregnant from their teachers and to be generally pressured to sleep with their teachers. Some women had overcome the pressure to marry early like one university student who in middle school was about to be married off to an older man when she cut a deal with her dad that if she passed on to high school she could stay in school, but if she failed she would be married. Luckily, she passed and now is a university student studying German.

Overall, having all these educated and motivated Togolese women around all week was great for the campers, but it was also great for me. It was so nice to be able to hang out with the university students and talk to all the professional women. It can be really hard to be a female volunteer in a village, because women in villages tend to be uneducated and therefore don’t speak French. Although we try to learn local language, the depth of conversation is limited. Women also almost always have children and a ton of household work in addition to farm work, so they have less time than men to just hang out. Men tend to speak French more and have more free time, but friendships with men are difficult because attempts at friendship are often confused with expressing interest in a sexual relationship or marriage. Basically, it was a breath of fresh air for me to be spending time with Togolese women who spoke French, had a similar education level to me, and defied Togolese social norms of early marriage and child-rearing. All around the camp was a really positive experience and I’m glad I’ll be able to do it again next year. After being here 11 months, I finally feel like I’ve accomplished something positive and it feels good!