CISV Philippines Summer Experience

So far my summer has been amazing and packed full with family trips and fun with friends but the best experience this summer was definitely going to Bacolod in the Philippines for a 2 weeks youth meeting.

The program I went with is called CISV, CISV is a international organization which promotes global friendship. It was invented after world war 2 by a American Psychologist who brought children together because her theory was it would promote global peace if the children of the world were together. Today 70 countries are involved with CISV and over 200 cities.

 

I first got involved in 2014 when I went to a village camp in Ottawa for a month when I was eleven, I liked this program so much I wanted to do another one so in January of this year I applied for a youth meeting and was excepted and so excited to go. I went to this youth meeting with 5 other 12-13 year olds and a leader so there were seven of us representing Canada at this international camp with 5 countries total (Canada, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, and the Philippines). Each year CISV rotates through four themes this year it was sustainable development and our camp theme was global warming and climate change so we had to some research about how they are affecting our country.

We left on a 14 hour flight to the Philippines which was kinda scary going to a different continent for 2 weeks. On the 29th of July we went to the airport and said our goodbyes, we got into the Philippines on the 30th because of the 15 hour time change so we lost a day.

The first few days Bacolod we stayed with CISV families who were so nice. The first family took us to their family ranch where we met up with the Italian delegation and went swimming, on a boat ride and horseback riding, between all those fun activities we had a native dish to Bacolod called Chicken Inasal which was delicious. Our second home stay took us around the Bacolod city. They showed us the city hall, the school she went to when she was younger, and the downtown of Bacolod.

We got to the youth meeting on the 1st of August at 3:00 ish, where we met everyone for the first time except for the Italians who we met at the first homestay. Everybody was so friendly and I felt like I had known everyone forever especially my best friends Sofia from the Philippines, Jasmijn from the Netherlands and Anna from the Netherlands.

The first few days it took a little while to get used to the schedule because each day was so busy and filled with activities and there was 10° of humidity on top of 30°C which made everyone so tired.

Because this was a older age program we got to plan a lot of our own activities in planning groups which was fun because then we could plan great activities that everyone would find fun. The hard part was trying to relate these activities to our camp theme which was global warming and climate change. For example one of the activities my group planned was we had 4 countries around a lake. One country is the water purification country, one country was the farming and fishing country, one country was an green energy country, and a factory country. All the countries need the lake but the lake is being polluted by the factory country and there are a bunch of problems that all the countries have to fix by the end of the game. That’s an example of the type of activities we planned out.

these are just some photos from our daily life at camp:

 

One of my favourite parts of the camp was the excursion day, in the morning a CEO of an organization that plants mangrove trees to help the ecosystem in the Philippines came and talked to use about mangroves. After the presentation we went out and planted some mangroves by the Oceanside. It was actually a lot of fun and we were only supposed to plant 2 trees but I planted like 7 trees.

We got really dirty because we planted the mangroves in the mud so we went back to the our camp building and cleaned up, then we headed out to the mall for shopping part of the day. Before shopping we went to this buffet called Vikings were we had delicious food and ate so much I felt sick. After we then went around a huge mall where we bought souvenir and sat in massage chairs for a few hours. At 5 pm we went to some famous ruins in Bacolod which were absolutely beautiful and then when we thought the day wouldn’t get any better we watched a traditional dance and had a delicious dinner.

The last night of camp was probably the saddest because we had this CISV tradition called the the candle ceremony where we had to say our favourite part of camp and light a candle. Everyone cried and didn’t want to leave the next morning because we all had so much fun at this camp and made such good friendships that will last a long time. I miss everyone from my camp so much and want to go visit my friends. This was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had and probably will ever have.