Camp Be and Glow round two with an entrepreneur twist

Joel Atwood
ED2 -- Gakenke District, Northern Province

In my last blog post I wrote about camp Be and some of the things that went on during that camp. This year my region did another two camps at my school. After last year we wanted to focus on the theme of entrepreneurship. With most volunteers in my region successfully starting GLOW and BE clubs we needed to help students in making those clubs sustainable.

One common reoccurring problem most volunteers have faced when teaching with their students and even dealing with their schools and the education system is the a lack of creativity. To put more precisely; a lack of an ability to critically think and problem solve. Most teachers teach by giving students notes then leaving class. The students copy the notes into their notebooks and then they are expected to memorize those notes. Many of the teachers will collect the students notebooks at the end of the term and will mark them for completeness and neatness. These methods do not produce students who can critically think, problem solve or brainstorm.

So this year when planing out what we would do for our GLOW and BE camp we decided to focus on creativity and entrepreneurship. Most of the activities we did there based on this theme. The advantages of having such a theme for our camp is that it will help them be more successful after they finish school. A second advantage is it will also help make our GLOW and BE camps more sustainable by giving students ideas and ways to raise funds for the clubs.

Activities we did during our GLOW and BE camp ranged from basket weaving; where we had a cooperative of women come and show students how to make baskets to making pizza (my personal favorite) to making water prof cell phone cases for peoples phones. The students really had fun doing these activities and even our host school was fascinated by the pizza making operations. For our second camp, the school even selected some of their cooks to observe how to make pizza so that they could make if for special occasions in the future. So, not only where we educating our students but also the school staff.

One problem we did have that I noticed, especially with the basket weaving, is how some of the Rwandan male facilitators refused to participate. When I asked them why they said that basket weaving was for women. I countered with do not you have to hands and a brain? It took some convincing but by the end of the session those facilitators where weaving there own baskets. It was a little victory in the battle of gender roles which is very prominent in Rwandan culture.

There is still a lot of work to be done with teaching students creative thinking and teaching students that both boys and girls can creativity think to solve problems. These camps are just the first step and I hope that many of the clubs at our schools can take what they learned at these camps and run with it. My departure from Rwanda is only a couple months away so I cant help wonder about what the future will bring to the land of a thousand hills but my vision for this country is a country of freedom, creativity and prosperity that surpasses even what has been accomplished in the western world. Is this possible? Yes and I believe GLOW and BE camps are helping to plant the seeds for making this vision a reality. 

By Joel Atwood