Oh my.

It appears that I'm a pretty terrible blogger.
Well, a lot has happened since I last posted. We have been down to camp twice, on Labor Day weekend (September 2-5) and another weekend (September 30-October 2).
I'll start with the first trip down.

Friday/Saturday
I had a soccer tournament in Taos this weekend. We had one game on September 2 (Friday), which we won, and we lost early the next morning. At this point, I knew my team was not going to make it into the championship game, so I left with my dad to drive down to Santa Fe, where my mom and Menchie (our foreign exchange student) were watching my brother's soccer tournament. My truck was all packed with arts and craft supplies donated by (first names only for privacy reasons) Suzanne and DJ. I had also written to several businesses (Target, Hobby Lobby, Michaels and Wal-Mart) asking for donations, but to no avail.
Menchie was an honorary Girl Scout, so I took her with me and we headed south towards camp. We stopped in Socorro and got Mountain Dew and some new sunglasses for Menchie before continuing on again. It rained. And then the sun came out and we baked for a while. And then it started to rain again. We drove through some strange weather for about 7 hours, with 3.5 gas tank fill-ups, 3 Mountain Dews and 1 set of directions (supplemented by a lovely invention called a GPS) before finally reaching camp. The rest of the troop had gone down on Friday, so we were already a day late but were happily received and ate dinner before going to bed.

Sunday
We woke up early on Sunday and went down to the lodge to have breakfast. Lots of CMW former campers were there to help us work, so we slept in the cabins up the valley. Our cabin sustained damage from a frightening wind storm that restored it to its original state from the old CMW days. Surprisingly, only the front of the cabin was affected.
It was freezing cold. We had only ever been up at camp in the summer before, so this fall weather was new to us. Needless to say, we huddled around the fire in the lodge and tried to thaw out. I started talking with everyone that had been working on the Arts and Crafts Center the day before, and found out that Joker and Phantom had spent all of the previous day cleaning dead animals, live animals, animal excrement, dust, dirt, unidentifiable objects and general debris out of the building. It was so bad that protective masks were needed! A few of us went up after breakfast to work on the building. Joker and Phantom repaired holes in the walls and floor and tried to seal up the building better while I started to organize some of the art supplies that I had collected into neatly labelled plastic storage containers. Due to the amazing generosity of Suzanne and DJ, this took almost all day. After lunch, members of my troop helped me sort through old art supplies left in CMW storage. A lot was unusable and had to be thrown away, but a good portion of it was in good condition and was carried up to the building to be sorted and packed.

Sunday
We were going to hike up to Halfway to Heaven this morning, but didn't get to it. We ended up eating breakfast, putting some finishing touches on each of our projects (which mostly involved storing art supplies and sealing up the building for me), and heading up to Halfway to Heaven to take goofy pictures and sigh about having to leave.

It's probably closer to heaven than halfway, but the name's just too catchy to let go of.

We must care in order to change the world.

I am sitting at my computer, thinking about the food crisis in the Horn of Africa and the arson attack in Mexico and how lucky I am.
I want to be useful to the world--I want to fight AIDS and world hunger and work for women's rights. My quest to help people begins now.
This weekend, my troop and I finished the Journey that was required for us to earn our Gold Award. We hosted an overnight Dove Real Beauty workshop for about 35 girls from all over New Mexico! I had been to a Dove workshop my sophomore (I think) year in high school, and was inspired by what Dove had to say to girls and women about beauty. We talked to the girls about eating healthy, sleeping well, body image, and how to stay healthy in general. We split into groups according to groups (Daisy, Brownie, Junior, etc.) so that we could go over the things that were requirements of each group's specific badge that they were earning. In my group, one of the things we did was looking through magazines and talking about the photo-editing practice. At the end of our session we had the girls each find a photo in their magazine that they considered "beautiful", and we were pleasantly surprised by the results. Instead of saying "She has pretty makeup", the girls were saying things like "She plays soccer and I love soccer!" and "This girl is beautiful because of her smile". It was really inspiring to see the girls' mindsets shift as they realized that beauty comes in all shapes, colors, heights and weights. I hope that we changed everyone's perception of beauty for the better, but if all we managed to do was inspire one girl, I will still consider it an exceptional use of our time and talents.
Instead of being just a requirement for our Gold Award, this Journey was something that I'm going to remember and be proud of for a very, very long time.
Want more information? CLICK HERE to find out more about what Dove's all about.
My mission is to get people to care.

And related to changing the world:

Click here to find out how you can alleviate some of the need for food in the Horn of Africa, and save lives.

We hold up half the sky.

I am overwhelmed by the beauty that is this world. The random acts of kindness I see each day, the New Mexico sun, even doing laundry seems like an earth-shattering, energizing, inspiring experience today.


"I dream long and lustfully of a better world that is both my muse and objective, and I will neither apologize for nor amend my desire because of its remove from the here and now; its distance encourages my reach." -Shakesville blogger


Because girls are the ones who're gonna change the world. 


Dear Emotional Creature,
You know who you are. I wrote this book because I believe in you. I believe in your authenticity, your uniqueness, your intensity, your wildness. I love the way you dye your hair purple, or hike up your short skirt, or blare your music while you lip-sync every single memorized lyric. I love your restlessness and your hunger. You are one of our greatest natural resources. You possess a necessary agency and energy that if unleashed could transform, inspire, and heal the world.
I know we make you feel stupid, as if being a teenager meant you were temporarily deranged. We have become accustomed to muting you, judging you, discounting you, asking you--sometimes even forcing you--to betray what you see and know and feel.
You scare us. You remind us of what we have been forced to shut down or abandon in ourselves in order to fit in. You ask us by your being to question, to wake up, to reperceive. Sometimes I think we tell you we are protecting you when really we are protecting ourselves from our own feelings of self-betrayal and loss.
Everyone seems to have a certain way they want you to be--your mother, father, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, boyfriends, fashion gurus, celebrities, girlfriends. In researching this book I came upon a very disturbing statistic: 74 percent of you say you are under pressure to please everyone.
I have done a lot of thinking about what it means to please. To please, to embody the wish or will of somebody other than yourself. To please the fashion setters, we starve ourselves. To please boys, we push ourselves when we aren't ready. To please the popular girls, we end up acting mean to our best friends. To please our parents, we become insane overachievers. If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your own needs are? What do you have to cut off in yourself in order to please others? I think the act of pleasing makes everything murky. We lose track of ourselves. We stop uttering declaratory sentences. We stop directing our lives. We wait to be rescued. We forget what we know. We make everything okay rather than real.
I have had the good fortune to travel around the world. Everywhere I meet teenage girls, circles of girls, packs of girls walking the country roads home from school, hanging out on city street corners, arm in arm, laughing, giggling, screaming. Electric girls. I see how your lives get hijacked, how your opinions and desires get denied and undone. I see how this later comes to determine so much of our lives as adults. So many of the women I have met through The Vagina Monologues and The Good Body and V-Day are still trying to overcome what was muted or undone in them when they were young. They are struggling late into their lives to know their desires, to find their power and their way.
This book is a call to question rather than to please. To provoke, to challenge, to dare, to satisfy your own imagination and appetite. To know yourself truly. To take responsibility for who you are, to engage. This book is a call to listen to the voice inside you that might want something different, that hears, that knows, the way only you can hear and know. It's a call to your original girl self, to your emotional creature self, to move at your speed, to walk with your step, to wear your color. It is an invitation to heed your instinct to resist war, or draw snakes, or to speak to the stars.
I hope you will see this book as something living, that you will use it to identify and overcome the obstacles or pressures that prevent you from being an emotional creature. Maybe after you read these stories and monologues you will be inspired to write and share your own, or paint your bedroom wall, or fight for polar bears or speak up in class or learn about sexuality or demand your rights.
When I was your age, I didn't know how to live as an emotional creature. I felt like an alien. I still do a lot of the time. I don't think it has much to do with the country I grew up in or the language I speak. In this book you will meet girls from everywhere. Some live in remote villages, others in huge cities or posh suburbs. Some worrying about whether they will be able to afford the latest purple UGGs, some worrying if they'll every get home after two years of being held as a sex slave. Some deciding whether they are able to kill a supposed enemy, some on the brink of killing themselves. Some desperate for the next meal, some unable to stop starving themselves. Girls from Cairo, Kwai Yong, Ramallah, Bukavu, Narok, Westchester, Jerusalem, Manhattan, Paris. All of them, all of you, live on the planet right now. I think whatever country or town or village you physically live in, you inhabit a similar emotional landscape. You all come from girl land. There you get born with this awakeness, this open-hearted have to eat it, taste it, know it, defy it. Then the "grown-ups" come with their rules, their directions. They teach you how to make yourselves less so everyone feels more comfortable. They teach you not to stand out. They get you to behave.
I am older now. I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, with being this alive, this intense. I just don't want you to have to wait that long.

Love,
Eve




*Taken from I am an Emotional Creature by Eve Ensler

First few donations!!

I am happy to report that I have gotten a few donations for the Arts and Crafts Center! I have sent out letters to companies in Albuquerque asking for donations, but as of yet I have not received any replies from those. I am still dealing with reverse culture shock from being back in the US, but I seem to be adjusting well.
Camp was cancelled because of the mass fires that have sprouted up all over New Mexico due to carelessness and drought, but we are currently making plans to go down on Labor Day weekend, and maybe a few times between now and then (hoping the area gets some rain!).
Sorry for the lame short post, but I just had time for a short update.

Intro-mania

Hey, all.
I'm Sparky (or I may have possible been rechristened Spunky, which I like better, so maybe I'll keep it). I'm 17 years old, and have been a Girl Scout for about 11 of those years (correct me if I'm wrong, this is just an estimation). My troop (3049) and I are currently working on our Gold Award (successor of the Silver and Bronze Awards) and are rebuilding a traditional Girl Scout camp in southern New Mexico.
(I also really like parenthesis).
About me personally? I love to write and create things, read, play soccer, and learn languages.
About the Gold Award? It's only the most prestigious award a Girl Scout can get--the equivalent of the Boy Scout Eagle Award. It is mostly comprised of a project that takes months or even years to plan and carry out, and leads to the betterment of the community and the Girl Scouts themselves in some way. It's becoming more and more recognized by colleges and universities around the United States, and is a great way to do some soul-seeking and self-initiated volunteering. My troop has already been approved by the Girl Scout Council, so we're ready to roll!
About Camp Mary White? Founded in the early 1900's, it's been a traditional camp for Girl Scouts for a very long time. It's a home-away-from-home for girls, and a place where memories and dreams are made. However, in recent years it has been mostly unused and is falling into disrepair--camps are no longer held there for large groups of girls, and the some of the buildings are unsafe for habitation. My troops dream, after seeing the magic of the camp in the past two years, is to rebuild the camp so it's as healthy and vibrant as it was 50 years ago. If you want to learn more about CMW, click HERE.
Why are we doing this? 
At my troops Scouts Own last year at Camp Mary White (CMW), I wrote this:

I am so close to the stars here. I imagine I can hear them singing, thrumming with their vast enormity. They twinkle at me, as if enjoying my insignificance. The moon has set now, down behind the hill to my right. It's rays are still visible over the crest of the hill, lingering like the memories of the days do as you sleep. Beethoven says that in the wee hours of the morning, the silence is ponderous; heavy with a beautiful presence. I am not afraid of silence, in fact I relish the few moments before sleep claims me, when my body is still but my mind is free to roam and dream. There is a magic about this place that in unequaled by anything I have ever seen. The love the counselors have for each other and days gone by is overwhelming, and a spectacular thing to see. A shooting star went by a few minutes ago. You could see it break through the atmosphere and illuminate the sky. It streaked towards the ground, breaking apart as it showed its true colors--gold, blue, purple and green. The things you can't catch on camera are the ones most vividly remembered, I find. As I roam across the land, traveling to new and unexpected places within and without, I will add to my internal film strip and keep the memories close. Camp Mary White changed my life. I have yet to see how or why, but the difference is profound. So, in the words of the Portuguese, ay, suadades. 

But we can't do it alone. My specific part of the project is to make an Arts and Crafts Center at CMW. I will be using the old Arts and Crafts (A&C) building, which may need a few minor repairs. But we need craft supplies, and have a non-existent budget (it IS volunteering). I am asking for the following supplies, or a monetary donation of any size, to help my troop help small girls create their dreams.

Glue, glue sticks, string, yarn, colored pencils, crayons, markers, scissors, sequins, glitter, white and colored paper, rulers, pens, pencils, fabric, poster board, paints and brushes, stickers, arts and crafts books and kits, beads, embroidery thread, fabric, clay, tables, chairs storage containers, shelf-building material and tools. 

If you would like to help, or have any tips or ideas, comments are welcome. If you would like to contact me, leave a comment and I'll get back to you (and feedback is welcomed as well). 

Also thanks to my advisor Twinks! :D And to everyone who's already donated, and the amazing support of my troop, family and friends!

*Sorry for any strange wording--I'm in Portugal as a foreign exchange student and have not been speaking much English lately. I'll get back to New Mexico on June 26th.