Ji-ho!

**I wrote the following blog in May, but had trouble uploading the video on YouTube. I was finally able to upload this 4 minute video (it took nearly 24 hours to do it!), so here it is in July.

One of the global initiatives Peace Corps has going is something called Camp G.L.O.W., which stands for Girls Leading Our World. It is an initiative to promote leadership among women and awareness of gender issues. Peace Corps volunteers typically organize week-long "camps," but on Tanna Island I have been co-leading a different sort of Camp GLOW. Every Thursday after school I gather with the class 7 and 8 girls from Loukatai and we wait for Hali, a fellow volunteer at a school about 2 miles away, to arrive with her class 6 girls. And to be fair, it is often Hali and her girls waiting for my girls, who are often held in-calss after the 3pm "school's out" bell, because, well, because that bell doesn't always mean what it is supposed to mean. And it doesn't always ring when it is supposed to ring. It appears that teachers are welcome to teach until they feel finished, and whether or not that correlates to the 3pm bell is just a question of luck. But on Thursdays, we like it when the bell rings and the students get dismissed simultaneously at the scheduled time of 3pm, so that we can then get our Camp GLOW's 30 girls started on the activity of the day. So far we've gotten together a number of times, to do art activities, drama games, and most recently, learn the moves to the "Ji-ho" dance. I proudly copied most of the moves from the modified choreography done last summer at Camp Jabberwocky on Martha's Vineyard, the greatest summer camp in the USA, where the dis-abled and the able-bodied get together for all sorts of wonderful madness and mayhem. So thank you Camp Jabberwocky, for the original inspiration to teach the girls on Tanna this spectacular dance. We worked on the dance for only a few weeks, just in time to perform it at a neighboring school's Talent Night. Both my school and Hali's schools had originally planned their own talent nights, which was why we had started working on the dance in the first place, but at the last minute both schools decided to postpone the event until further notice... But thankfully there was a Talent Night at the nearby Loanatom French Mission School. Not only that, but word was starting to spread about this little dance and we had been formally invited to attend and share our group's talent. It was a fun night to say the least, even if the girls were half-embarrassed and half-scared-to-death to perform in front of people. The group dynamic was great, as was the night's net effect of forming a great bond amongst all of us. I love these girls. And in a male-dominated culture, where the girls have already silenced their own voices by the time they are in classes 6,7, and 8, I love that maybe these girls' voices will grow. In fact I am sure that the strength of their voices will grow. They have already said a lot by Ji-ho-ing it in front of a crowd, especially because of how reluctant they were to stand up and shake it in the first place. So I hope this video uploads and I hope that it says more than my few words can about this awesome group of young women on Tanna. This is the dress rehearsal, so know that the girls were even more shy to dance during the real thing just 30 minutes later. Ji-ho! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7oWJJGkks8