Celebrando El Sur

At the end of July we had a conference here in the south of the country. It was called Celebrando El Sur (celebrating the south). After having been to a few camps here, I know how positive they are for the kids, but can also be very stressful for the volunteers. This camp turned out to be the best camp I’ve done so far in country. My friend Justin planned the whole thing pretty much by himself, handing out different charlas and tasks for the rest of us to do. We had 15 volunteers and 45 kids. It was up outside of this city called Neiba about half an hour on this partially paved, super curvy road, then turned off onto this rock (not gravel, but big rocks) road that leads at a 45 degree angle up this mountain to this camp. It was a pretty small place but had bunk rooms for all our us. Volunteers bunking with the kids because a bunch of Dominican teenagers unsupervised is just generally not a good idea. Heck, I guess that applies to all teenagers, not just Dominican ones.

The theme of the camp was diversity. So we had charlas about gender, ethnicity and immigration, HIV/AIDS and sexual pressures, biodiversity (I did that one), the continents of the world (I did Africa), and a few others I’m not remembering right now. The kids had to present a few times as well. They had to present something that represented their community. My two girls Laury and Germania presented about our holy spirit. They had a photo that they shared with the group while they talked about the holy spirit festival. Each group of kids also had to do a presentation on a different country of the world. We also had a game night where we had a bunch of stations the kids stayed at for 15 minutes each. The favorites were musical chairs and beer pong (with water of course) and flip cup. On the last day, the kids were divided into groups and they were each given a news article about some sort of diversity that they had to turn into a news broadcast. They were hysterical. We all got matching t-shirts and took a group picture on the last day complete with certificates for each of the kids and for each of us volunteers. It was a great weekend with the kids and I was so proud of my girls.