Conflict Resolution Camp

Last week (February 24 -26), with the help of Selena, five fabulous UWC-Costa Rica students, and 10 Peace Corps volunteers, I helped stage a conflict resolution camp for 26 Salvadoran youths.

The idea for this project originated when I started a girls' soccer team in my community. The team was having so many problems just getting along. There were fist-fights on three separate occasions, and after the last one I decided to disband the whole thing. People quit the team all the time because they decided they didn't like another player and couldn't stand to be around them. When I talked to other volunteers about it, they all related similar experiences with a variety of different groups.

I decided to talk to Selena, my teacher from high school (UWC) who worked with us on conflict resolution in hopes that she might have some advice on how to teach the Salvadorans in my community basic conflict resolutions skills. Selena is Salvadoran herself and was very concerned with what I was saying. She explained that she thought that the civil war had in many ways deprived the people here of developing constructive ways to deal with differences. The generation of youths I was working with had grown up with no good examples of managing conflict.

We brainstormed a way to deal with it and in the end decided to organize it as a camp. In addition, Selena convinced the United World College in Costa Rica to send five students to El Salvador to run the workshop. I organized everything on this end, including inviting Peace Corps volunteers to apply to bring 3-4 youth leaders to the camp. Additionally, I organized three days of touring in El Salvador for the UWC students to help teach them a little bit more about the history of the country and the context for the workshop.

In the end, the camp was a great to success. That's not to say that there are not things that should have been done differently, but overall, everyone involved walked away with a really positive experience. For me, the most powerful part was really seeing these Salvadoran youth have an opportunity to talk openly and honestly about themselves and their lives. The youth here really have so few opportunities to talk candidly, and are for more the most part quite reticent. I, and the other Peace Corps volunteers, were all so impressed with how much they opened up.

Also, it was so exciting for me to work with UWC students again. The experience at UWC was one of the most important in my life, and spending time with the kids from Costa Rica really brought me back. It was great to share my two worlds (Peace Corps and UWC) and bring them together in this productive and special way.

Hopefully, this camp will become an annual collaboration between Peace Corps and UWC-Costa Rica. It was a very powerful experience and I am so grateful to Selena for all her support!