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.

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.