Camp ALMA

Well, it happened. After one year, four months, and 28 days of being with the Peace Corps, it happened.
I got the warm fuzzies.

This past weekend, in the bustling town of La Union, 22 volunteers held a 3-day leadership camp for teenage girls in Piura and Tumbes. Thirty girls showed up in total to hear successful women speakers, play team-building activities and do other, you know, camp-y stuff. Like water balloon volleyball and sing Boom-chick-a-Boom.

If you've been to camp, you've heard Boom-chick-a-Boom:

I said a boom-chick-a-boom! (campers repeat)

I said a boom-chick-a-boom! (campers repeat)

I said a boom-chick-a-racka chick-a-racka chick-a-boom (campers repeat)

Alright (campers repeat)

Ok (campers repeat)

One more time ...

The song is sung through once and then followed by different "styles." Cheerleader-style (with perky voices and jerky arm movements). Fat-man-style (with a deep voice, and big, heavy stomping). Mouse-style (high-pitched voices and revealed upper teeth).

You get the idea.

Well anyway, the whole weekend was spent covering super intense themes, like feminism, sexual health, domestic violence, entrepreneurship, and volunteerism. There was even a panel of five professional women (including a police officer) to answer questions and talk about how they arrived to where they are. Each theme was accompanied by discussion groups and activities. And at the very end, the girls broke up into groups according to where they live and developed a plan of how they were going to improve their own community.

It was awesome. And the girls really seemed to have a great time. As a special treat, we even put together a mini soap opera that some of us did during dinners. I played the friend of the main character, Jessica.

The plot was that two bad guys (Don Macho and Señor Sinvergüenza) are trying to destroy the camp. "Girls can't be leaders!" they scoff. And the whole time they are plotting this evil plan, Jessica and our friend Alex start making goo-goo eyes at each other, and a love story develops in the margins.

Eventually the bad guys kidnap Jessica — who is the weekend's MC, and thus destroying Camp ALMA — and Alex and I chase after her. Sr. Sinvergüenza stops us in our path as Don Macho takes off with Jessica, and I challenge him to a duel (fyi--we used empty plastic Coke bottles as swords ... It was awesome). Amidst the dueling, I convince him to give up his machista ways and admit that girls are awesome and can work together alongside men.

Meanwhile, Alex chases after Don Macho, only to be foiled by getting his glasses knocked off his head and left blind. Jessica sees this chaos around her and decides no longer to stand idly by and let Don Macho win. So she yells at him and makes him listen to lots of healthy self-esteem and pro-women rantings, which, in turn, makes him melt. Yay! Girls rule!

The campers were really into it. Always booing when the bad guys came onstage, swooning when Alex walked in, or cheering for me when I kicked Sr. Sinvergüenza's butt in Coke-bottle sword fighting. They loved it.

That is until, the final scene.

After the last battle, Alex and Jessica have their climactic romantic moment, and Alex leans in to give her this huge, wet, passionate kiss — and Jessica stops him.

"Hold up," she says. "I only just met you. How about we get to know each other before we suck face."
This, of course, was to go along with the sexual health and domestic violence sessions we had where we talked with the girls about taking their time and really getting to know a boy so they don't end up having babies at 13.

The girls hated it. They actually booed when all of us left the stage. They wanted the passion! The kisses! The lust! And we gave them a responsible reality.

Ah well, maybe next year.

At any rate, the girls had a great time. And the morning they were all getting ready to leave, breakfast was late. So in hopes of keeping them from becoming too antsy, I asked if they wanted to play a game or sing a song. Naturally (in true camp fashion), they wanted to sing Boom-chick-a-boom.

We sang for over a half hour. And at one point, while I was rapping like a regatonista, it happened. The warm fuzzies.

I just looked out and saw the enthusiastic, smiling faces of those girls, and it hit me.

I wondered how many of them had been told that they could do anything? How many had heard how far they could go? How much they could change their own communities? Peru? The world?

I wondered how many had thought of their future as something different than what had always been done before. Something other than just their mothers' pasts?

Even if we hadn't invited nine speakers to come and blanket them with wisdom, or even if we'd left out the tug of war or human board game, we had an effect on those teen girls. If only because we believed in them enough to drag them all the way out to La Union, Piura to meet other incredible girls like them and sing Boom-chick-a-boom.

The majority of them will probably go back to their site, do their planned activity, and that will be it. Nothing much will change.

But I have no doubt in my mind that some of them walked away from Camp ALMA with a nagging, a tugging toward something bigger. Something that will blow all of us away.

And that was enough for me.

Laura, 13, rolls for her team during the Human Board Game.

The girls playing a communication game, where one girl had a picture and she describes that picture to another girl who then draws it without looking at the original image.

The cast of Cuerpo de Pasión

All 30 of the girls from ALMA.