MEGAN ON THE RUN

Guys and Girls Leading Our World

I recently returned from an adventure in the desert, in a small southern town called Tinjdad. I worked at a GGLOW camp, also know as Guys and Girls Leading Our World. It is a program that encourages empowerment amongst the youth of Morocco as well as encouraging gender equality. Peace Corps implements this program in all sectors throughout Morocco. I was really proud of the turnout and how successful the camp was. We got tons of work done and covered some really important issues.
For starters we held a class for the older women of the community. We showed a video in Arabic about proper family planning. We addressed many problems that the women in Morocco face. After the video, we talked about a variety of issues such has going to the hospital to have your baby, not having an obscene amount of children and of course stop having children once you are older. We also touched on sensitive subjects such as protection and the usage of birth control. I was surprised to find out that many of the women were taking birth control. I also found out that many did not understand how to properly take the medication and were still getting pregnant. We opened up the room for discussion and allowed the women to ask any questions they had.
We also worked with teenage youth during this camp. With this group, we tackled the ever so sensitive subject of HIV/AIDS. For this class we had to split up the males and females. It is such a "hush hush" topic here, we simply couldn’t hold a discussion with the males and females together. I was really surprised at how open the females were and what they were willing to speak about. I felt the discussion was a huge success and was so proud of the students.
The camp continued with a hand washing class for the smaller children and a discussion of women’s rights in Morocco. Many of the smaller children spoke about their mothers and what they wished for them. The camp ended with an environment day that included an all day hike through the desert and a leadership day. For the leadership day, we invited several professionals from the community to come and speak about their jobs. We had an artist, several teachers and an association director attend the seminar. Each spoke about their education and what it took for them to become successful in their lives. The students were very responsive and had so many questions. It was nice for them to see successful professionals from their community who started in the same places they are . . . often times poor and destined to marry young.
Overall this was a great weekend and it was fun to work with youth in another part of Morocco. I left that camp feeling like work had really been done and differences were made.

posted by MeganontheRun @ 12:36 PM