User blog comment:Sambarnes/Survivor: Belize - Now Casting!/@comment-33641024-20190709224703

Name: Camila el-Sharif

Age: 27

Residence: Glendale, CA

Occupation: Hair Salon Owner

Biography: Camila enjoys work, gathering for cookouts with her family (her mother Esperanza, her younger twin siblings Christina and Carlos, her son Nicholas and her boyfriend Devin), watching Netflix and taking self-defense courses (she's a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu)

Camila says she will win SURVIVOR because she believes that no one in this game has encountered a woman as ruthless, as hungry or as cutthroat as she is and she wants to not only show her family the woman she has become - solid, responsible, tough - and her son that he can do anything, just as long as he sets his mind to it.

Background: Camila is of Mexican and Lebanese descent and has younger twin siblings, Christina and Carlos, who are younger than her by three years. Her father left the family when Camila was five to go back to Lebanon extremely suddenly and the family was raised in a single parent household by her mother, Esperanza. Initially she was a well-behaved girl who got good grades, but when Camila was 14 she fell in with a bad crowd after being subjected to bullying in middle school and started drinking, doing drugs and fighting on the streets of Glendale. She fell pregnant at 16 and decided to drop out of school and take her GED at the same time in order to get away from the influences negatively impacting her life, eventually giving birth to her son. Camila named the boy Nicholas and initially began to raise him with her mother's help. But when Nicholas was a year and a half old, Camila started to relapse back into alcohol abuse and started to lash out at her mother. Then the unthinkable happened: her father came back to California, in order to take Camila and the baby to Lebanon and marry her off to one of his friends. Realizing the situation she was in, Camila immediately stopped drinking and ran off with her child in the dead of night to an undisclosed location in Washington State where they hid out for four years while her father, her mother AND Glendale PD looked for her. Eventually her mother found her location and told her it was safe to come back to Glendale, since her father killed himself over the "shame" that Camila supposedly put on his family's name six months after she vanished. To this day, she refuses to talk about those four years to her family or anyone else - not because anything traumatic happened to her and her child but out of a desire to keep that time of her life a private matter. After that ordeal, she committed herself to making a living by going to cosmetology school and obtaining her hairdressing license and she started by cutting hair at a salon. Realizing that she not only was good at what she did but that she had a loyal client base, her hustling instincts kicked in and gained enough credibility to successfully establish her own salon, which she has done for the last two years. She is incredibly proud of her achievements of owning her own business, repairing her relationships with her family, creating a loving family unit of her own with Nicholas and being in a long term relationship for the first time since she was pregnant - and she is extremely protective of those things.

Character Archetype: Bad Girl/Schemer/Momma Bear Mix

Strategy: Camila is willing to try to make a positive first impression in order to analyze her current situation and to not rock the boat, but she knows that she should be willing to play incredibly aggressively if need be in order to either further her position in the game or if she's in danger of being voted out. She's also willing to do it by any means necessary, which could include some tactics that others might perceive as crossing moral and ethical boundaries. In addition, she knows that alliances are the name of the game in SURVIVOR, so while in the overall sense of the word she's a free agent, she's willing to work within the confines of an alliance on a short to medium term basis and to even establish a ride or die relationship with someone so that they could bounce ideas off of each other about their position(s) in the game, clues to the idol, not going insane among the other tribe members, etc. She will also attempt to try and form bonds with her tribemates on a deeper level, using any possible personal connection to try and find a common thread to get them to like her and not vote her off. She'll mention her own story only if absolutely necessary (except for what occurred during her four years in Washington State). If it helps her in her initial strategy of manipulating her fellow players, all the better.

Strengths: Manipulation, Social Awareness, Street Smarts, and a surprising amount of Strength, both in the challenges and in terms of emotional strength.

Weaknesses: Being non-judgmental about other people and their personal circumstances, Selfishness, Being too emotionally invested with people and Impulse Control (i.e. confrontation)

Anything Else: Camila is 5'8'' and can speak English, Spanish and conversational Arabic.