The Camp Hope Experience

With Camp Hope just around the corner (the first session on August 2nd and the last on August 18th) we at World Camp are quite excited. Camp Hope is a summer program that happens each summer for kids in Malawi living with HIV. With a HIV prevalence of 10.6% HIV is unfortunately common amongst Malawian youths. Camp Hope gives these kids a space to meet other youths living with HIV and engage in educational programs to help them cope.

Some of the main focuses of Camp Hope are to: increase understanding of anti-retroviral therapy (ART), promote nutritious eating and healthy living, as well as to improve self-confidence and decision making skills. Youths living with HIV and their guardians face a plethora of issues ranging from social stigma around HIV/ AIDS to remembering the names of treatments and how to take them. Camp Hopes both guardians and youths to handle these issues by developing programs which help kids handle all aspects of their health as much as they can while enabling guardians to provide the best support.

This year Managing Director Emily Stallings and myself are traveling to Malawi in the beginning of August to assist with this year’s Camp Hope. This will be my first year helping out in Malawi after interning in the Asheville offices for a year and I could not be more excited. Camp Hope will be my first opportunity to try doing what I want to do for the rest of my life; teaching health education abroad, particularly sexual health education. While there’s room for improvement in the American sexual education system, I feel that teaching sexual health in the developing world truly change the world. Especially in countries like Malawi, where 46.9% of the population is under the age of 14, empowering youths with knowledge of sexual health could prevent so many negative health outcomes.

Camp Hope is particularly interesting for me because of the holistic approach they take. Sexual health and ART understanding are taught right alongside healthy cooking and eating classes as well as classic camp activities like crafts and games. Even after the completion of Camp Hope there are Camp Hope Follow-Up sessions and Guardian sessions to reinforce and expand upon the themes at camp. I’m so looking forward to seeing the effect that Camp Hope has on these kids and their families as well as on myself and the staff and take that knowledge with me into my career.  Here’s to another great session of Camp Hope for all the kiddos and the adults, we all have a lot to learn!