What if you were invisible?  You know, like in that movie where there's an invisibility cloak and you put it on and no one can see you? That would be cool.  You could sneak around listening to people's conversations like a fly on the wall.  You'd be able to slip in and out of places without anybody knowing you were even there.  You'd be like an international spy, like a secret weapon.  Yep, that would be cool.  Unless you didn't want to be invisible.  What if you couldn't get the cloak off?  What if it was stuck to you like glue and no matter what you did or said, nobody saw or heard you?  No one even knew you existed.

Laura* got a taste of what if feels like to be stuck in an invisibility cloak when she moved across the country to Southern California. Back home, Laura stayed busy with friends and classes and family.  There was always someone to talk to and share with.  But after moving to east SD county, Laura began attending a new school, one filled with strangers instead of friends, loneliness instead of busyness.  The challenge to meet new people and create new relationships was scary.  Isolated from what was familiar and surrounded by people unwilling to reach out to the new kid, Laura spent each school day wandering from class to class completely alone.

Before the loneliness could completely engulf Laura, she took a chance and attended one of Grossmont Union High School District's three-day camps called Camp Lead at Pine Valley Bible Conference Center.  As part of the Project Shield youth development program, Camp Lead is designed to give high school students the opportunity to break free from the preconceived stereotypes that force them to stay behind boundaries of intolerance and hate.  They discover that every single person desires to be and is worthy of being accepted and respected.

When Laura was given the chance to see how boundaries are self-imposed, how changing one's self compels change in others, and how powerful her personal influence is, she committed herself to transformation.  Not only did she begin making the first move to make new friends, she began walking across a crowded room to say 'hi' to someone who was alone.  She began reaching out to the person sitting alone at lunch, stopping to talk to the person reading alone at break, and walking side-by-side with the person walking by himself to class.

Once she learned how to destroy the cloak of invisibility, Laura didn't stop with her own.  She set out to destroy the cloak trapping others inside a solitary world of rejection.  And that one small decision that Laura made is rippling across the divisions of age, gender, culture and race, and twisting invisibility into acceptance and hope.

*names have been changed