National Girls’ Forum

Sunday, July 13, 2013

Let me start off by saying that I got the best care package yet.  It came from my parents and cost $140 just to send, but it was amazing.  It had several packs of salami, pepperoni, and Velveeta.  It even had four different bottles of hot sauce and a package of gummy bears!  It was incredible.  I ate sandwiches for days after I got it. 

The National Girls’ Forum (NGF) went well.  For those of you who don’t know, I am on the Committee that put it on along with three others, and it has been a lot of work over the past few months.  As a committee we had to do everything from selecting participants and speakers to figuring out logistics to creating the materials we would give them.  The goal of the NGF is to bring together PCVs, their host country national (HCN) counterparts, and girls from their communities to share best practices and information.  The theme of this year was Keeping Girls in School. 

This was the second year of the Forum, and it brought together approximately 30 PCVs, 30 HCNs, and 30 girl participants, along with NGOs and ministry officials from all over Cameroon.  We covered topics like ways to combat early marriage, communication, decision-making, and relationship skills, community engagement, best practices, and panel discussions for the girl participants and HCNs.  It lasted three days and we provided the hotel for four nights along with breakfast, lunch, and per diem for dinner. 

While there are definitely some changes that we want to make for next year’s NGF, I think that overall the Forum went really well.   This is only the second year that the Youth Development (YD) sector of the Peace Corps has been in Cameroon, and the second year that we have been putting on the NGF, so both the sector and the Forum have improvements to make.  However, we had a couple of great committee members who put on last year’s Forum, and those changes have already started. 

For example, this was the first year that the girls were invited too.  The Forum was held in the beach town in the South Region, Kribi.  It was incredible seeing girls from all over the country who may not have even been outside of their small village before see the ocean for the first time.  They were running around in their full pange dresses through the water, holding hands with the PCVs that brought them, and saying things like ‘it’s nice, but why is it so salty?’ 

I’m not the best YD volunteer.  I don’t really like working with the kids themselves, I like planning things like the NGF that will bring together a lot of different people to learn from each other, sharing ideas and best practices.  Luckily, there are better YD volunteers that worked with me, and planned things like a bonfire for the girls on the beach and games for them to play.  Cameroon is such a diverse place; one of the best parts was seeing the southern Anglophone girls, wearing shorts and t-shirts, playing games with the northern Francophone girls, covered from head to toe.  They may not have been able to understand each other, but they were having fun.  A lot of times there is tension between the Grand North and the Grand South, or between the Anglophones and the Francophones, but it is situations like this that let them see they are really all the same. 

Because of the change in the calendar for next year, the National Girls’ Forum is being moved up to April instead of June, so we are starting to work on it now, even while we are still creating our final report and thank-you letters.  Both years that YD has put on the NGF we felt rushed getting everything finished, so we want to get a head start on next years.  If you would like to see copies of the Welcome Book or other materials, please let me know. 

The Closing Ceremonies of the 2013 National Girls' Forum