Dear Friends:

We had three camps operating simultaneously in March/April. What excitement and pride to jump from a single camp to three.

Our second camp was with God's Golden Acre (GGA), a South African nonprofit in KwaZulu Natal (KZN), the province in South Africa most heavily infected with HIV/AIDS. www.godsgoldenacre.org. Theywork with children in foster care; do outreach work into the communities around them with training and food parcels for the most needy families; and sponsor more than 100 soccer teams in KZN.

Our third camp was with Volunteers in Service Overseas (VSO), a British organization with 1500 volunteers working in 34 countries. www.vso.org.uk Their project in Limpopo Province, in conjunction with the Ndlovu Medical Centre, was working with needy children and they wanted to start a camp program but needed some technical advice and support.


Fresh from the water element on the ropes course, a tired, but happy, camper emerges

The December and January camps brought with them new programs that were not only successful, but opened my eyes to the value of program components that might be valuable even if they do not bring the promise of continuity.

The 118 boys and 99 girls at the two camps had no visible alteration of their experience of what camp had to offer or a lessening of their total enjoyment of camp. But, in fact, we had radical (for us) changes in the program.

Staff members, including the ones pictured here, were the real stars of our 16th camp, which took place this past September/October. They worked together as one, in a spirit of joyful cooperation, providing the 127 girls who attended this camp with an exceedingly happy experience.

The cohesiveness of the staff marks an evolutionary development for WorldCamps. We recognized the need for bonding among staff members and had the good fortune to find a skilled professional to be the bonding agent. Gabrielle Raill, Director of Camp Ouareau in Canada, engaged the staff members in a powerful exercise, along with her staff member Rhianna Walz of Australia.

Our three trainers – Jackie, Mellowman, and Phumlani, have formed a dynamite staff training group. They sense what is needed and how to meet the need while simultaneously having fun.

Dear Friends of Sizanani and WorldCamps,

We completed the final two of our three camps with the EW Hobbs Elementary School in Soweto. This represented a departure from our normal practice of reaching out in the community to select children from orphanages, other youth groups, and from among the children of patients in the support groups of our partner, HIVSA, a large psycho-social AIDS Clinic in Soweto.

Camp Results Report
from E.W. Hobbs Primary School,
Kliptown, South Africa

Prepared by A.B. PLAATJES
School Camp Coordinator

Camp Sizanani
To all concerned.

Allow me to thank you and your organization for the wonderful opportunity you afforded our pupils.

The programme is ground breaking in it’s approach and it definitely bears fruits. I do not personally teach all the children that went on camp, but I have seen a change in all/most of the children as I interact with them. There is a change in the atmosphere at school. When speaking to them they all seem to have something positive to say about the camp and all ask me when they will be attending the next camp.

I want to share with you, as a donor and supporter of WorldCamps, some important recent information.

These intent young women, campers at our most recent camp in April, were part of an entire 6th and 7th grade at a Soweto elementary school. Moving from our past patterns of taking children from a wide range of places, we decided that it might make a greater impact to have an already existing community, such as a school, participate in the camp program at the same time.

It also provided us with the challenge/opportunity of our first coed camp.

Dear Friend Of WorldCamps,

I feel a little like the corporate president telling you, the shareholders, how well the company has done over the year.

We have done well. It's hard to believe that in January 2004 we held our first camp in South Africa. For those of you less familiar with WorldCamps, our camp program delivers a traditional camp experience with a special emphasis on HIV/AIDS awareness to South African youth.

In the past two years we have made great strides. In the last year alone we doubled the number of children who were able to attend our camps. We have served a total of 1512 campers at the 12 camps we have had since January 2004.

Our post-camp Kids Club programs, which serve as a follow-up mechanism for our campers, have doubled in size. Last week, alone, 500 former campers attended one of the four clubs.

The photo above is a reminder that, while the plans for growth and development of camp are important and exciting, we are all about the children we serve. They remain terribly needy, vibrant and vivacious, spirited, warm, talented and appreciative. They are like sponges as they absorb the information we provide. There are new revelations at each camp as we work toward making the camp program and the after camp Kids Club program more effective.

The camp program is constantly being stretched. Michelle Schorn, my South African counterpart, is doing all the day to day work of camp. Rather than relaxing as she gets the many systems in place that are needed for a camp that has 6 sessions a year with 135 new campers at each camp, she is constantly challenging our staff and the program's structure with new ideas. We tried a 7-period day in order to cram in more activities for the children (and realized that it was too much). She asked Thulani, the very talented head of Drama to adapt "Julius Caesar," being studied by one grade in the public school curriculum next year, and place it in a Soweto setting, rather than in Rome. It was performed by the older four (of nine) groups, each group performing a different act with a different cast. It was a great success and we can't wait to hear how the campers like Shakespeare's version.

As we complete the final three camps of our first program year of 8 camps serving nearly 800 children, I want to share an article that was written about us in the Boston Globe.

From The Boston Globe, January 24, 2005

His summer camps provide fun, games, and lessons about life and the epidemic. By John Donnelly, Globe Staff | January 24, 2005

MAGALIESBURG, South Africa -- Neo Pertunia, a 15-year-old girl from Soweto, recalls nervously packing for a 10-day summer camp this month, the longest she would ever be away from home.

She stuffed two pairs of jeans, five T-shirts, and her beloved baby-blue high-top sneakers into a bag. And she carried with her the sound of her worried mother's voice, "Please take care of yourself, Neo."

I can tell I am becoming more legitimate in my new life as a nonprofiteer. On the plane from Boston to South Africa, I asked the chief stewardess if she would ask passengers who weren't going to use the toothbrush and toothpaste provided by the airline to please collect them for HIV/AIDS affected children at camp.

Happily, the British Air crew collected about 50. What a great way to get something that would just be thrown away.

Camps: As for the camps themselves, the fact of once again raising enough money without institutional support was satisfying in itself. Because of your support, another 193 children got to go to camp.

This is a report from Camp Sizanani (Zulu for "help each other") after our second South African camp, our first for girls. It was for 150 girls and was for 13 days ending on April 8.

The big excitement for me was finally being at a girls camp. My camping career has been with boys exclusively, as my daughter Cathy still reminds me, with a gentle edge in her tone.

Of course, there were other unknown factors, too; such as whether girls from the extremely male-dominated South African society would respond to a camp experience and whether we could find strong South African women counselors to be good role models in empowering the girls.

Dear Friends of WorldCamps,

You deserve a more official report, but this is more in the form of a narrative of our first camping program in Africa.

(An article in The Christian Science Monitor article captured some of the achievements of camp but I want to give you more details of the 10 days of camp plus the week of training. In case you missed it, the link is: http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0203/p07s01-woaf.html)

STAFF TRAINING

The most underestimated part of camp is staff training; particularly with a staff where everyone is new. We had the great advantage of having one of the world's preeminent staff trainers, Michael Brandwein, give us three days of his time. We could not have achieved the same results without him.

This is to give you a brief update on my 12 days in South Africa.

I had an education and made great progress towards my goal of establishing a residential camp for children affected by HIV/AIDS.

On the first day, I met with hospital HIV/AIDS psychiatric social work clinicians from the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. The hospital, in Soweto, is the largest (they said) in the world. Their clinic involves both well and sick children of HIV/AIDS infected mothers. It provides services to the 3 to 4 million people of Soweto. "If we haven't seen it, it hasn't been seen" seems to be their mantra.