Greg Mortenson

The girls sit in a semicircle in Linda Falcao’s living room, eating chocolate-chip cookies. Seniors at Lower Merion High School, the girls joke that the desserts are sometimes the best part of being a GUAVA girl.

The other, of course, is “the cause.”

“We decided to channel our energies and dream big,” said Lauren Falcao, 17, Linda’s daughter.

GUAVA stands for Girls United Against Violence Anywhere, a civic club the girls started this year to help oppressed women who are victims of violence in Third World nations.

The desserts are plentiful at their meetings, and so is the camaraderie, which, they say, comes with working together for the good of women less fortunate than they.

In February, the GUAVA members raised $5,000 to benefit a rescue center for Kenyan women fleeing genital mutilation.

Riding on that success, they hope to raise $20,000 to build a school in a remote region of Afghanistan or Pakistan, where women have few opportunities to be educated.

“From the first meeting, there was this incredible spirit in the room,” Lauren Falcao said. “It’s about helping and caring for girls our own age in other parts of the world.”

The recipient of their current effort will be the Central Asia Institute, a Montana-based nonprofit that in a decade has raised $2 million and built 31 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Founder Greg Mortenson, 46, mountain climber-turned-philanthropist, will be the featured speaker at a GUAVA gala scheduled for Jan. 30 at the Middleton Conference Center, next to Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church. The girls hope proceeds from the gala, along with donations from the community, will help them achieve their fund-raising goal.

Mortenson said this was the first group of high school students to contact his organization, and that their goal of raising $20,000 was “inspiring.”

“When we bring a letter from them to the girls in Afghanistan, it means a lot to them because they have heard promises of aid that often go unfulfilled. So this is a connection between them and girls from the outside world,” he said.

“Sometimes you think of teenage girls as self-absorbed, but the GUAVA girls show that teenage girls do care and are very concerned and reach beyond their own world of television.”

The seven girls in GUAVA said that once they began researching how women are victimized by violence, they felt they had to do something.

“Never say this generation is not into philanthropy,” said Linda Falcao, 43, an employment-discrimination lawyer who acts as adviser to the group along with another parent and lawyer, Karen Gelula. Gelula’s daughter, Dylan, 9, a fourth grader at Cynwyd Elementary, also belongs to GUAVA, as does her friend Lindsay Auerbach, 9, a student at Coopertown Elementary in the Haverford School District.

On a recent day, the girls talked about the need to bring boys into the club.

They advertised meetings at Lower Merion High School, renaming their school club – an organization separate from GUAVA – Students United Against Violence Everywhere. The meetings drew 25 people, including some interested males.

The hope is that it can become a staple of club offerings at the high school. The focus will be issues affecting women and girls who are victims of violence and poverty.

GUAVA started after some of the girls were assigned a history project to research a global social problem and then design a solution. They discovered the practice of genital mutilation, sometimes on girls as young as 2.

When the girls held their first fund-raiser in February for the Kenyan safe house – run by the V-Day organization and founded by Eve Ensler, playwright of The Vagina Monologues – they performed excerpts from the play at the Main Line Arts Center.

“The monologues are so in-your-face,” Ashley Johnson, 17, said. “I was embarrassed at first, thinking, ‘Oh no, I’ve got to say this in front of my parents.’

“But once I started, it was fine.”

Contact Susan Weidener at 610-701-7623 or sweidener@phillynews.com.

To contribute to GUAVA’s effort to raise $20,000 for a girls’ school in Afghanistan or Pakistan, send donations (with the notation GUAVA) to “Central Asia Institute”, Box 7209, Bozeman, Mont. 59771.

© 2003 Philadelphia Enquirer