SLS 2010, Orphanage Project, & My Bday (Part I)

08.17.10

Dostar Rural Orphanage Project, Summer Youth Leadership School 2010, & Becca’s Birthday (Part I)

These last few weeks have been absolutely the most fun, unreal, busy, rewarding and crazy of my time in Kazakhstan – all in a good way!  As soon as I got back from vacation, we were put to work preparing two projects that we had won funding for in the spring.  The first was an orphanage visit to Sairam as part of our orphan transition project (generously funded by the American Councils’ FLEX program), in which we teach life skills to older youth about to transition from the orphanages into their own independent lives outside.  All in all an incredible project that was great to be a part of.  Our young volunteers from the Volunteer Youth Leadership Center “DOSTAR” held three days worth of sessions on leadership, sexual health and professional development.  My session the last day was on goal-setting.  It was a great bonding exercise for us trainers too and a good warm-up for what was to come at our leadership school!*

[Games and trainings at the orphanage]

The Summer Leadership School 2010 (fondly known as ЛШЛ, or Летняя Школа Лидерства) has been the annual highlight event for the volunteers of our organization for ages.  The first SLS was held eight(!) years ago and it has been evolving, improving and growing every year since then as our trainers have become more and more experienced and new leaders and participants have joined. It is a six-day camp that combines all of the best peer-to-peer trainings in an intimate environment where trainers and participant youth from at-risk or underprivileged groups live, learn and play together.  This year we had our international Y-PEER youth trainers, Dostar volunteers, youth from two rural orphanages, and HIV+ youth and their social environments (peers and family members). Participants range from ages 14-21 and our team of counselor/camp leaders (важатые) were all in that same age range.  While some people wonder how we do not face more disciplinary problems with counselors being the same age as participants, I can say that the peer-to-peer model works special wonders in the camp environment and in our volunteer work in general.  Having counselors in positions of leadership who are the exact same age as participants (as young as 14) and can have fun, befriend and socialize with everyone on an equal level while simultaneously embodying a real-life model of success, responsibility and proactivity is an amazing inspiration to the kids that attend the camp.  By the end, they were all asking how they could become volunteers and counselors at next year's SLS!

This year our camp was funded by PEPFAR (the U.S. President's Fund for AIDS Relief) through Peace Corps (thank you!).  Our camp was extraordinary throughout, and it opened in a particularly extraordinary way.  We had the honor of hosting U.S. Special Representative to Muslim Communities Farah Pandith, who was specially appointed to this pilot position by Secretary Hillary Clinton.  The embassy contacted me about helping to arrange her public diplomacy trip to engage with youth in the Muslim regions of South Kazakhstan, and as luck would have it she was able to open our camp with an inspirational speech and an illuminating focus group/Q&A with our kids.  SR Pandith talked about Muslim identity, technology and information sharing, intercultural experience, and the importance and potential of youth leadership worldwide.  It was a great pleasure to meet her and the trip's support staff from the State Department and the Embassy in Astana.  We had a number of media releases from her visit, including the Embassy press release and two television reports (when I finally got back to the city a week later I was informed by many local friends of my 5 minutes of fame on our SKO channel!).

As for the other activities, the pictures and this rough schedule should tell it all:

8:00 a.m. – Wake-up call

8:30 a.m. – Morning exercises (stretching and dancing!)

9:00 a.m. – Breakfast

10:00 a.m. – Trainings (sexual & reproductive health, team building, leadership, human rights, youth in governance, goal setting, time management, public speaking/theater skills)

1:00 p.m. – Lunch

2:00 p.m. – English Club

3:00 p.m. – Outdoor activities (sports, relay races, a «detective»-themed scavenger hunt)

4:30 p.m. – Shower

5:00 p.m. – Preparation for evening activities

7:00 p.m. – Dinner

8:00 p.m. – Evening activities (Music videos, КВН Comedy Club [MUCH better than this one...remember that?!], Halloween, final theater-based enactments on human rights, secret friend ceremony)

10:00 p.m. – Dance! (Diskoteka!)

11:30 p.m. – Feedback

12:30 a.m. – Sleep

As you can see, none of us slept much the whole week!  It was full of memorable moments: an open discussion about HIV stigma, Britt's UN video of 30 human rights that one of our volunteers simultaneously translated into Kazakh, a water balloon toss-turned-fight, unbelievable acting in the evening activities by some of the kids who were so shy they wouldn't say a word the first day, a choreographed counselor dance to MJ's Thriller (in full costume!), writing silly notes to each other and trying to guess our "secret friends" (each person was assigned one and we all had envelopes hung in the hallway to leave notes in), everyone writing down their "SMART" goals in life and sharing them, me instilling a newfound love of basketball into everyone in my group on a dusty court on sports day, crazy dancing to both Rihanna and Kazakh traditional music at every night's diskoteka, distributing kefir and sweet rolls as a midnight snack, watching the kids put on a "roast" skit making fun of all the vazhatis (counselors), going around in a circle for an hour each night at feedback and talking about how amazing each day was and everyone's favorite activity and thanking each other, staying up all night the last night (SLS tradition!) to watch shooting stars and play pranks on whoever fell asleep, kids in tears at the end as we were leaving because they didn't want to leave their new friends and great memories.

[Teambuilding exercises the first day of camp]

[Learning body parts at English Club!]

[One of the "brigades" (teams) after their skit!]

[Water balloon (/water condom:P) fight!!!]

[My favorite picture. We counselors were supposed to be spies for the detective scavenger hunt.  Evi is не в тему:D]

["Thriller" zombies!]

[Everyone at the camp wanted a Chinese tattoo of their name. Only mine was real (the name, not the tattoo)! :P]

[With fellow counselor and lovely friend Aida]

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the last day of the camp happened to be my birthday, and it will go down in history I am sure as one of the most memorable ones I've ever had.  At a little after midnight as we were doing feedback on the day, everyone burst into the "Happy Birthday" song.  Then Zhenya (my counterpart's son and one of my new adopted little brothers who is so cute we started a fan club in his name) called me over to check my Secret Friend envelope….he and Nurbek (another one of our 14yo heart-breaker counselors with yet another fan club :) had somehow acquired fresh roses and left them there just minutes after the clock struck midnight on my bday.  I nearly cried it was so adorable and thoughtful!  That night my director and her son called to send their wishes and I got several other texts and messages from friends both in Kazakhstan and at home (thank you, guys!).  Then the next morning I woke up to posters lining the dorm walls of the camp…the other counselors had stayed up half the night making them and a special "Happy Birthday" envelope above my normal envelope that was stuffed to the brim with paper hearts and everyone's well-wishes.  On top of that I got several other birthday songs, a dedication to Enrique Iglesias at the night's diskoteka:P, many calls from home and a video/slideshow montage to celebrate both the end of both my most memorable bday and our amazing camp.

[My little brothers <3]

[SO sweet]

[Note Zhenya's печенька! :D Love you guys!]

Needless to say I left SLS 2010 with a heart full of love for all our amazing team of volunteers and counselors, awe at all our gifted kids and all their potential despite so many life hardships, wonderful contacts from the embassy and state department, and a renewed sense of inspiration and dedication to my work and friends here.  Life could not be better.  And the adventures continue – more on my birthday party (Part II!), summer Dostar "Family Reunion" pool party, more successful project and grant news, etc. to come in the next post!

*In between these two projects were two other important events.  The first was Britt's HIV/AIDS Training of Trainers Conference, which 4 of our guys attended and adored.  Thank you Britt for the wonderful training ideas, many of which our guys used at SLS! The second event was an NGO roundtable that I helped organize for SR Pandith's South Kazakhstan visit.  It was very successful and she was a wonderful and fascinating guest, as always.  Thanks to the U.S. State Department and Embassy Astana for letting ABWK and Dostar be such a big part of her visit!

[NGO Roundtable with SR Pandith]