On Sunday, July 25, hundreds of youth marched from Parque Metropolitano in the foothills of Quito, Ecuador, to Plaza San Francisco in the heart of the Old Town. There they met up with thousands more people who had come from across the Americas to attend the first ever Social Forum of the Americas.

The march was both a symbolic opening and closing. The festivities in Plaza San Francisco kicked off a week of workshops, panels, seminars and cultural exchanges meant to unite people from Canada to Argentina in their struggles for human rights. The march down through the centre of Quito also marked the official closing of the Campamento Juventud (Youth Camp), which opened July 21. People are still able to camp out until the end of the forum, but they will have to cook for themselves and there will be no more workshops.

Youth camps have become a tradition at the various social forums, both regional and global, providing a space for youth and others to meet and live together in a collectively-run area during social forums. The camps have come to cover two major needs of people attending social forums: a sense of community with the others attending the forum, and an affordable place to stay when hotel managers hike rates knowing their city will be teeming with thousands of foreigners for a week.

Looking back on the camp that brought together almost 600 campers, organizers say it was the small miracles that held the whole thing together.

With so many people arriving anywhere from the middle of the afternoon to the middle of the night, hesitance on the part of city officials to co-operate with the project and only five people officially on the organizing committee leading up to the camp, there was room for as many things to go wrong as went right.

The process to set up the camp, according to organizers Jose Phoano and Veronica Leon, both from Ecuador, was jumpy from the beginning. Although there were eventually 12 on the organizing committee once the camp started, it was up to only five individuals to go through the process of negotiating with the city and setting up all the logistics for the camp. Although much help was also given by the social forum organizing committee itself, the bulk of the resources needed had to be found from other places.

The most difficult task was finding a site for the camp. Parque Metropolitano lies on the outskirts of town, with little access to public transportation, particularly for early morning workshops, and about an hour’s walk from the site of the forum. Although the park offers more resources and space than many of the others in town, including bathrooms and a building converted into a gathering hall and convenience store, organizers were originally pushing for something much closer to downtown.

“The city was hesitant to have the camp set up downtown,” said Phoano. “We asked for water, sanitation, medical resources. The answer was always that they didn’t have any. As soon as we decided to go to Metropolitano, all of a sudden they could help.” Eventually, organizers were able to gather together just about everything they needed, including more than enough food supplied by local farmers to feed the campers staying there.

Another significant issue was that of collectively running the camp. While there was a team of people who organized logistics, the camp itself, like other youth camps, was meant to be run in a collective fashion. That meant pitching in with cooking, doing odd jobs, running workshops, etc. Organizers found it difficult to get as much help as was needed from campers, although everything got done in the end.

“There was a problem with decentralization,” said camper Ariane Blais from Montreal. A lot of what needed to be done either didn’t necessarily get transmitted to the campers themselves or received an ambivalent reaction from campers, she explained. “It was clear, though, that the organizers were working hard,” she added.

Andres Rueda, another camper from Armenia, Colombia, agreed. “It seemed that it was always the same people cooking. People saw what had to be done as tasks, not as part of their participation in the camp.”

Leon and Phoano agreed that this was one of the most difficult tasks they faced. “It was difficult to explain that collective working doesn’t end with washing your own dishes,” said Phoano.

“That’s one of the issues with collective organizing,” said Blais, 20. “You can’t just impose it on people.”

The camp also provided an area for those in attendance to exchange information both through autonomously organized workshops as well as simply sitting around the campfires, which happened early and often as soon as the sun went down each night around seven.

With a plethora of panels and seminars in the coming week, though, more social encounters often won out at the camp. Although there were still many workshops filled with challenging discussions, the possibility of simply meeting people who had lived different experiences and could provide new perspectives on one’s own experiences seemed to carry the day. These exchanges took place everywhere from the eating area on an outcrop looking out over the city below to the half dozen campfires where music from across the Americas flowed out long into the night. Although more structured exchanges may have been expected, little complaint was ever heard.

“I feel like I have been able to better discover where I fit in to the larger struggles in across the Americas,” explained Rueda. Being able to live in the same area as people from across the Americas for a week provided him with a chance to both build his understanding of the issues facing others and to connect with them on a much more personal level. “It meant a lot just to be able to look people in the eyes.”