Three Amazing Days of Insanity

By Kashay Sanders, VOICE 4 Girls Program Development Assistant 

Last week, we conducted interviews for counselors at Shadan Engineering College for Women for three days.

Shadan is by far our most enthusiastic recruitment site, given that the majority of our camp counselors from last year were from this very school and they have spent the last year telling all of their friends about camp.

I painstakingly organized the interviews, set up time slots, sent reminder emails and a location. We got there, day one went smoothly, and then the reports from former counselors came in. 

“Oh, my friend never got to submit her application!”

“She missed her interview and now she’s crying!”

“Oh, the girls in the CSE department didn’t send you their emails, PLEASE give them one more day to apply!”

So much for organization. Over the next two nights, my inbox exploded with applications and I was left with no idea of how they were going to fit into the next two days of interviews! A win for VOICE, a logistical nightmare.

So our new Logistics Manager, Valli, and I called in reinforcements (i.e. Averil, the co-founder of VOICE), to do interviews.

And, at the end of the day, no one got turned away from an interview.

It was three days of insanity, but also one of inspiration.

Hearing the stories of triumph from these college women was simply amazing.  Some who ranked first in their class, some who are the only women in their communities which attend school, and also some with progressive families who are invested in social work, and organized film festivals and blood drives.

This amazing social fabric of women will make incredible role models for our girls this summer.

From the Founders: From Office Woes to Field Work Joys

By Averil Spencer, Co-Founder

For the past few months, I have been trapped in the office finishing the camp curriculum for this summer.

While I love designing the material and thinking of creative ways to engage the girls in important topics, the process is isolating and I spend most of my time with my computer.

So, when it came time to recruit counselors, I was more than ready to leave the office to interview different young women from around Hyderabad.

Recruiting counselors is one of my favorite parts of my job!

I get to talk to young women who are achieving their dreams talk about how they see their life and the lives of women around them. I am able to learn so much from their experiences and the way they look at life. At VOICE, we created an interview process that focuses on testing communication skills through a series of personal, thought-provoking questions.

We believe that as a counselor you need to be able to share your stories and not be afraid to be silly yourself or you will not be able to connect with the girls and make them feel comfortable.

During the interviews, I was able to hear funny, embarrassing, heart-wrenching stories from young women. One question was a scenario that asked counselors what they would do if campers would not open up during the discussions about menstruation.

One interviewee remarked that she would share her personal story and tell the girls all about the first time she got her period. She remembers it clearly because her mother made her stay home for 10 days and she would only eat sweets.

In India, there is a substance used in cooking called ghee, which is clarified butter. There is a sweet here that is sugar and ghee. It is molded into a block of pure sweetness and she had to eat 2kgs of it in 10 days. She said the first day was fun because she loves sweets. The second day was still pretty good, but by the third day she was struggling. On the 4th, she couldn’t eat anymore but her mother said she had to finish it. For the next month she had to eat that sweet every day after dinner. I’m still not sure why she needed to eat that particular sweet, but I must say I really admired her fortitude!

Another girl talked about how her parents live in Dubai and she studies here in Hyderabad with her younger sister. She was a small girl with a huge flower in her hair and a pretty dress. She didn’t look like she could take care of herself, let alone run a house and manage her teenage sister. She adheres to a strict curfew and holds her sister to the same. While she would like to go out to the movies and wear jeans, she knows her community would not approve and make it harder for them to live in the neighborhood. Two girls alone already push the limits.

Being able to connect with these insightful, interesting women in the interview process has rekindled my enthusiasm for camp.  This whole process reminds me that while I have been focused on getting material together for the campers, VOICE really creates a cycle of change and chances for growth.

Counselors grow just as much if not more during camp because they are given an opportunity to learn new material and ways of connecting with people but also a chance to be a leader and inspire others.

So far, we have 40 counselors recruited from Shahdan Women’s Engineering College and plan to recruit about 60 more from Hyderabad Central University, St. Francis College, and St. Ann’s College.

We have a lot of work and only 2 months to do it in, but Camp VOICE 2012 is coming together!

Catching Up With Camp Counselor Manal Omer

Manal, counselor from Camp VOICE 2011.

Manal Omer is one of the amazing counselors that helped get Camp VOICE off the ground this past summer. She is currently completing her final year at Shadan Women’s College in Hyderabad, India and has been excepted to work with Microsoft after graduation.

We caught back up with Manal and asked her to talk about how Camp VOICE impacted her last summer. Her story is below: 

It was my first day at the camp  and as I entered IQRA MISSION HIGH SCHOOL I found little girls playing on the grounds. They all were almost half an hour early to the camp! I was quiet nervous actually. But little did I know that  these little girls are going to change me in ways I never thought I would and they were no ordinary girls.

At the end of that day, a group of girls from 7^th class came up to me and said “ We’re glad to have you as our counselor.”

That one statement made me realize that this was not just a summer camp for these girls , it was an opportunity for them to be something. To do something they were always told they could not!

At first, none of them would speak up. These girls were brought up in families where every minute they were told that “girls aren’t supposed to raise their voices or talk loudly”.  I knew that because I was brought up the same way.

My first move was to make the girls realize that my family had almost the same thinking as their family. Initially it was only me sharing my stories. However, as the days passed by I couldn’t get the girls to keep quiet.

It was so amazing seeing all of them glow when they knew the answer to something or when they had something to share.

I still remember the day clearly when we took the girls to Deloitte for a field trip. As we entered Banjara Hills all the girls were staring out of the windows and when they saw City Centre they went stunned. “WOOOOOWW” one of them said as she explained this was the first time she’d ever seen such tall buildings.

Visiting Deloitte in Hi Tech City  was an amazing experience. The girls had so many questions! Questions even I wouldn’t come up with.  After visiting Hi Tech City  more girls started coming up to me asking career related questions like “what do I have to do to become an engineer like my brother.”

As the camp was coming to an end,  I had many parents tell me how they could see the changes in their daughters. They told me how their daughters were already excited for next year’s camp.

The biggest take away for cap for me was when some of the girls came up and told me that they want to be like me someday.  They said they wanted to be a computer engineers and teach girls just the way I taught them.

That conversation was definitely the best part of the camp for me.  I didn’t know that duration of one month was enough to get someone thinking about what they want to do with their lives.  It amazed me that their ideas and dreams had been jump started.

Camp VOICE was more than me teaching the girls something. They  were  teaching me so much!

It would be completely accurate to say that camp changed the lives of so many girls last summer

I was one among them.