The Necker Swapping Begins...

First of all, can I please just say. Mexico. WHY ARE YOU SO HOT?! I thought I would be ok in the heat today, and it's fair to say that I didn't die, but oh my God! 38 degrees Celsius is no joke. But I made it, and - even better - Mauricio's mum (Mauricio is my host in Merida) has washed my clothes for me, so I won't run out of underpants tomorrow!

But that is not important right now. What is important is that I have now swapped two neckerchieves, and linked two UK scout groups with groups here in Mexico!

The first groups to be linked were SADnet, a Scout Network in the north of the UK, and Grupo Uno Cancun Clan de Rovers, with whom I spent my first weekend in Mexico camping.



Here I am, in my official scouting swimming shorts, exchanging
 the neckers with Jorge, one of the rovers, in his official sunglasses

As you will remember from my blog post about Mexican Scouting (you did read it, right?), the Clan de Rovers are aged 18-22, and get up to all sorts of cool scouting activities that any Scout Network would love to try in the UK (building and sleeping on your own sleeping platform, anyone?) For the non-UK readers, the Scout Network is the final section in UK Scouting, for ages 18-25, and they take part in many camps and activities. Many Network members are also Scouters, or Scout Leaders, with the younger sections.

The second necker I swapped was with 1st Fram Scout group, who are based in County Durham, again the north of England, with the Tropa of Grupo Uno Playa del Carmen. I met the leader, Victor, when on camp with the Rovers, and he very kindly agreed to host me for a few days, and was very excited by the chance to swap neckers and make contact with a UK Scout troop!

Here he is, proudly wearing his new necker! No uniform this time
as we weren't at an official scout meeting, but we did do the proper
handshake and salute, at least!

So the project is off to a flying start! I hope that it goes this well throughout the trip, and I hope that all the necker swapping is going to result in lots of international contacts, understanding, and friendship. I'll be honest - this project hasn't been done before as far as I know, so I don't know if it will work. But I really hope that it does, and with the support of the groups who are involved, I am pretty sure that this will be something special. Maybe I'll try to keep the blog going after the trip, to follow the progress of the groups.

Anyway, that's enough from me! We are thinking of swimming in more cenotes tomorrow (if you were too lazy to click the link, then cenotes are underground pools sacred to the Maya) before Scouts, so I had better get to bed! I think I will try sleeping in the hammock tonight, so that Mauricio can have his own bed back!

Mexican Scouting - a brief introdction

I've now had the pleasure of meeting quite a lot of Mexican Scouts from the Quintana Roo region of Mexico, (on the Yucatan Peninsula, including Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Merida), so I think I can start to let you know about how they work and what they are like compared to us back in the UK. Of course, some of the details might be different in other regions, but if they are then I'll let you know in a subsequent post. Of course, this does mean that you will need to keep reading to find out if anything changes!

First - the sections. split down quite similar lines to the UK sections, but the first section pretty much incorporates beavers and cubs together. So from 6-10 years old is the Menadas, the equivalent of our cub scouts (Menada means cub in espanol).The next section up is the Tropa , or Troop, from ages 11-14, pretty much the same as our Scouts. Up next is the equivalent of our Explorer Scouts, the Caminantes, or Pioneers, ages 14-18. Once you graduate from the Caminantes, you have the Clan de Rovers, (the Rover Clan) who correspond with our Scout Network, but only go from ages 18-22. After the ages of 22 you become a Scouter, or a Scout Leader. This means that, at 23, I should technically be a scouter.



It was just a bit unfortunate that the rovers adopted me first!

The sections, as in the UK, are easily identifiable by the colours of their shirts; Yellow for the Memadas, Green for the Tropa, Dark Blue for the Caminantes, Red for the Clan de Rovers, and Scouters wear a light blue/grey shirt. The shirts are all the same style, so it's only the colours that differ; unlike the UK, the Menadas wear full shirts instead of jumpers. The official scout trousers in Mexico are also far cooler than the UK Scout trousers, and the model they took the sizing from seems to have actually been a genuine human being instead of whatever it was they based the UK trouser sizes on! They zip off to make shorts, which I suppose is necessary given the weather, and for the girls there is an option very similar to the old Girlguiding Culottes, only more hardwearing - shorts with fabric over the front and back so they resemble a skirt.

There's quite a bit more pageantry surrounding the scouts that I've seen so far; on the camp, each group had their own banner to mark their area, and the individual patrols in the different Tropas all had made their own flags, so when they all formed up they really looked quite good! Each section also has their own chants (which I won't pretend to have remembered or understood), which made it quite hard for the county commissioner to get everyone's attention when trying to close the camp! Its something that I think we could do a bit more in the UK, it was quite apparent that the kids were getting into the spirit of things quite a lot more thanks to all the chanting and the jumping and the flags. In fact, especially with the Menadas, the leaders really struck me as being tremendously excited about what they were doing there; they were certainly jumping around enough!

As for the programme, the only section I can talk about is the Clan de Rovers; while on camp I attended a four hour forum about their community service projects (surprisingly, it wasn't boring, despite being in Espanol!) It seems that the rovers here include, as part of their programme, various service projects which they conceive of, organise and run. Suggestions at the forum included beach cleaning, painting the bottoms of trees to prevent ants from destroying them, and other things which I didn't get time to ask about as I was whisked away by an avid badge collector to talk about badges. But the idea struck me as one that we could use in the UK - how big a part of community service is Scouting, these days? We have our resurrected version of bob a job week, but certainly for groups in my area, this is about it. And it’s certainly true that one of the reasons Network doesn’t work that well in many places is a lack of focus. What if we incorporated these service projects into our programme for network, and so gave them something to base their programme around? Of course they would do other things, but making a difference in their local community might give them a bit of focus – and, of course, help the community, which is one of the things Scouting was originally built around! Because the planning and organising are all part of the process too, you can try literally any project you want – arranging it with the local council, getting paperwork; all these are part of the challenge!

So there you have it. No doubt I will add more as I go, but right now I need to send some more couchsurfing requests and pack for Merida and the 38 degree heat they were talking about on the TV earlier. Wish me luck!

Week 1: Finding my feet, Cancun, and The Quintana Roo Camp

As this blog might have people reading it from other countries now, I am going to have to try and use simpler English! However, there is a translate button at the top of the page, for if you get stuck, so I hope there are no problems with anyone reading this!

The first week has been, to put it mildly, brilliant.

Landing in Cancun, I was a bit disappointed to see that it was raining! It was only a brief shower though, and in no time at all I had met up with Monica, who I met through Couchsurfing.com! She and her friend Alfonso picked me up and took me to the local shopping centre, where we ended up sitting in a McDonalds, enjoying the free Internet. Monica was meeting some students at university to get some studies done (her final project was in on Friday) and I was trying to stay awake, as although it was 4pm in Cancun, it was 10pm in my head; I had got up at 5am that morning so to say I was a bit tired would be an understatement! I also met Adriana, a friend of Monica's who is in a rover crew here in Cancun.

Monica on the left, Adriana on the right - my first friends in Cancun!

We went for some pizza, and then met up with Armando, another friend, and saw a popular local hangout, complete with stands selling corn in all its glorious forms, some of which are nice and some of which are not so nice! By now I was getting a bit delirious from the lack of sleep, so Adriana drove me and Monica home for the night. Now I thought that I was going to stay with Monica in her house, so I got very confused when she got out of the car and started asking directions! It turns out that she had a friend who rents out apartments, and he had one free for a few days, so I was staying there! It was a bit scary when they closed the door and left me on my own for my first night, but I was so tired I didn't care!

For the next few days I saw some of the touristy side of Cancun, like the Mayan ruins and the museum (in the rain; it's so hot here that sometimes you get sunshine in the morning, and then rain in the afternoon after all the moisture has been evaporated. Finally my Geography A Level is worth something!) and the aquarium, with a dolphin show to finish it off. I also saw some of the other side of Cancun with Adriana; she took me with her to help with her university work, taking pictures of places in the city that they want to improve, and also going to a high school orchestra recital with Montse, another rover. For some reason, I also went to a salsa club, despite not knowing how to salsa and having decided to go to bed half an hour beforehand!

This is harder than it looks, especially after you have been bullied into eating lots of Tacos!

 

And then I went camping. The camp was the equivalent of a county camp in the UK, as it had all the Scouts from the Quintana Roo state of Mexico. This was good news for me because it meant that I could talk to Scouts from Playa del Carmen, my next destination, to try and find somewhere to stay! The camp was incredible, and lots of people wanted to get a photo with me because I was from the UK; it was like being a Scouting version of Robbie Williams! We did plenty of cool stuff, including a camp fire, making traditional Mexican food, building a sleeping platform (unfortunately I didn't get to sleep on it because there wasn't room but it was still good to help!) and I was honoured to help invest a new rover scout after the camp fire on the Saturday evening. It was great to see what they got up to on the camp, and I will put that in another blog post - this one is already long enough!

Suffice to say that on the Camp, Victor Torras very kindly invited me to stay in his house, so here I am! I had a fun coach trip with the Tropa and the Manada (more on those in another post, but basically other sections) home, and then we went out for Tacos with one of the Scout leaders (we had to wait for Victor because he was taking another leader to the hospital with a broken ankle), and I started taking my antimalarial tablets. So far, no bad side effects, and today I went swimming in a cenote (sacred Mayan pool, good for snorkeling and with a nice little ledge to jump in from), so all in all I am off to a great start! The people I have met have been so kind and willing to help me out, and have been very forgiving of my terrible Spanish! I will try to make the blog posts shorter in future, but thanks for reading and speak to you all soon!

Some thoughts as I sit in the departure lounge

There are times when the world feels huge. As I woke up this morning, the walls of my room seemed a million miles away, and the journey I was planning to take infinitely more so. The shower wasn’t warm enough, for some reason, and as I sat there shivering in the morning light at 5:15am, I will confess I had a moment of doubt. Well, I’ll confess that that moment of doubt was the latest in a few I had been experiencing over the last couple of days as the start date of my trip hurtled towards me like an out of control cement truck. Wouldn’t it be easier to spend the summer at home, with friends? After all, I had gone through a break up relatively recently, and I wasn’t sure that I was entirely over it yet. My friends and family had been a lifeline for me in the first part of this year, and now I was planning on leaving them for a third of a year. I felt like a helicopter with intermittent power failure, dipping down only to stutter back into life and ride up on another wave of positivity and enthusiasm for the trip, leaving a trail of smoke in my wake. Was I ready for this trip?

The answer, really, is no.

We are never ready, really. We can try to prepare, to brace ourselves for what’s about to happen, and we can try to reason away what is happening, but we are never truly ready for life. Now obviously I’m not talking about the small stuff, though I’m sure those of you with kids jumped immediately to thoughts of the school run when I said that. I’m talking about big life events: first day of school, first kiss with someone special, leaving your job, death of a love one. You can never be truly prepared for what you will feel, or think, or say (I’m not prepared for half the things I say), and you certainly can’t be prepared for what other people are going to do and say. There is no brace position that protects you from what life will do to you, either. Life changes you, and sure – you can try and prepare for that, but what will it change you into? Will you like what it does to you? Will other people? Life washes over us as sure as the tides, and it we aren’t drowning then we’re really doing quite well.

So what do you do? Is there any way, as Baden-Powell loved to say, to “be prepared” when it’s almost impossible? My answer would be, in this instance, don’t. To prepare yourself emotionally, spiritually even, for events like this can all too easily become the equivalent of making sure you can stem the impact of what life does to you. It’s like making a backup copy of your psyche, to be preserved against what is going to happen to you and what those things will do to you. To use the swimming metaphor, it’s the equivalent of putting on your diving suit, or getting in your submarine. But what do you miss from inside that cocoon? What glorious sights are you missing as you walk the floor of life’s ocean, safe inside your suit of armour? I feel like, at times, I have walked along my own ocean floor, insulating myself against the damage life might do to me, telling myself that I was really swimming.

That’s partially what this trip is about; this is me taking off my diving suit, and giving swimming a go. That’s what the anxiety is about; right now I am in the troughs and swells of the waves, gasping for air, with my diving suit tied to my back in case it all gets too much. But of course, the suit is weighing me down. So my first mission on this journey is to let that suit go. Because once the weight of that is gone, I will be able to swim with that tide. It won’t matter what life throws at me, because I won’t be busy trying to protect myself against it. The wave will swell, and I will be there at the forefront. And life, let me tell you something: not only am I going to swim with you, but I am going to conjure a surf board out of nowhere and ride the waves for as long as I can. If anyone wants to try surfing with me, just give me a call. Because that’s also what this trip is about; if I can free myself up and embrace life’s changes, then you sure as hell can to.

Now, where’s the Dixons? I forgot to buy a travel adaptor for the Surface.

The Kit video is here!

Finally! It's here! After a week's worth of intensive shooting, editing, and cursing at the editing software because it won't behave itself, my humble video about what to take travelling with you is ready! I hope you enjoy watching it, and any scout leaders out there might find it an amusing way to gently introduce the topic of packing at a meeting one evening.

 

 

 

Of course, there are other things that I will be taking. I'm taking my Powermonkey, a nifty little gizmo which will charge most electrical appliances (phones, cameras, etc) and can be charged through the wall, via USB, or even through solar power (something I hope to have in abundance in Mexico!) 

I will also be taking my trusty penknife, and also a longer hunting knife. Of course, the hunting knife will only come out when I am in the wilderness or on a scout camp, because apart from the fact that wandering around a city with a knife on your belt is, incredibly dangerous and invites more harm than it will keep away, it also looks stupid. A bit like someone turning up for a day's paintball in the woods wearing full army gear, including blast helmet designed to stop grenade shrapnel.

It's the woods, why did you turn up in desert camo?!

However, a larger knife could be very useful out in the wilderness, should I need to whittle some sticks, gather some woodshavings to start a fire, or even skin or gut an animal for dinner. I'll be honest, I would be a bit out of my depth if I was gutting the wildlife of the Mexican jungle for lunch, but the old Scout method of "cook it until it all looks like charcoal" should keep the worst of the food poisoning off.

 

Another very exciting piece of kit I have been donated is.... a SIM card! For the uninitiated, a sim card is the bit in your phone which allow you to make phone calls, and is identified by your phone number. And I have been given one made by a company called Truphone. Truphone specialise in getting the best value international calls by giving a simcard multiple numbers; for example, if I call someone in the USA, they will see my US number. If I call someone in the UK, they will see my UK phone number. I won't pretend to understand the ins and outs of how the technology works, but it's a brilliant idea. And they have very generously donated me a sim card... with $100 of credit on it! So thank you very much Truphone, and stay tuned to find out how useful this little bit of gear will be to me as I travel around the world!

 

Right, enough said. I've just finished work for the next third of a year, I have to go and try to get another scout shirt from the scout shop to swap with a scout group, then get in a game of FIFA with some mates, then go visit an Explorer Scout Unit in Pangbourne, and then drive up to Leeds for some indoor skydiving, a foam party, and a friends' birthday celebration. It's a hard life, but someone has to lead it!

Moot briefing weekend 2: fun, friends, and a reminder of just what we're embarking on

I wasn't particularly looking forward to the briefing weekend. The first had been alright: useful information, a questionable fancy dress disco, and a morning discovering how hard it was to talk about what there was to do in a British town using Chingford, Essex as the model town. There was some new information to be disseminated this weekend, but that could surely have been done in an email. I had forgotten the names of many of the people I met at the first weekend, and frankly I wasn't sure that 26 hours would be time enough to re-learn all those names. With only about three weeks to go before I leave the country and embark on my own adventure, did I really need to be attending a weekend about how to visit a foreign country and meet a bunch of people?

Well, as it turns out, yes I did.

This weekend was one of the first times that I have seen the tangible become the intangible. It was the first time that the reality of over one hundred young people, armed with hiking boots, microfleeces and (in my case) an arguably inflated notion of how good their dancing was, become the people who would be having the life-changing, character-building and horizon-broadening experiences that are spoken of in the leaflets and adverts for events like this. It was a weekend at which I was forced to reconsider my own opinion of what, precisely, I was doing at this event and in my own Scouting career in general. And, it must be said, the disco was infinitely better than it had been at the first weekend.

The first morning was, as I had expected, good and informative. We learnt why we hadn't heard lots of information from the Moot organisers that we had been told we would have by now, and we discussed when payments were due, and so forth. Then, in the afternoon, we played a game. This game involved splitting into three groups, each of which was given a different objective to complete and a different method of communication. Then, at the blow of a whistle, one person from each group was sent to watch the other teams and interact with them. At the time, I thought this was a disaster. We didn't know why we had to go and watch the other team, or how on earth we were going to interact with them (or at least I didn't). I was just as confused when I returned to my own team and realised I had forgotten how to communicate with them, and that in any case we hadn't been given enough language for me to convey my utter confusion at what we were doing. At the end, when we were asked what we learnt, I was hard pressed to find an answer that wasn't sarcastic and irritating.
No matter. I moved on to some more information bases and a chance to put up the tent, or more precisely to hunt for the tent that my friends Nik and Jon had put up earlier, which was easier said than done. Turns out that "the green one near the tree" is a very poor description when looking for a tent in the woods. But the tent was eventually found, and by that time it was dinner. And, after dinner, we were spoken to by a very unassuming man from Oxfordshire named John.

John casually informed us that he was the Vice-President for the World Organisation of the Scout Movement; essentially, the number two Scout on the planet. He had come to talk to us as his role was primarily concerned with international trips such as the Moot, and because he was extraordinarily excited that we were going. With my hand on my heart, I can say that I have never been inspired by another person in quite the same way as I was by John. He had the room spellbound as he told us of his experiences in refugee camps in Rwanda during their civil war, in which orphaned children were comforted and entertained by Ugandan Scouts who were 18. He told us about the wide game he played on the Russian tube network with a 14-year old who had started up Scouting in his apartment block in Moscow, months after the fall of the Iron Curtain. And most importantly, he told us how these experiences had shaped him, as a young man the same age as we are now, and convinced him that young people, both under and over 18, could be vehicles for change in the world and had so much to learn and to offer by meeting people from other countries. He then handed back over to Toby Parsons, contingent leader for the UK Moot contingent, who announced that pudding was ready. It was, I think, a sign of just how incredible a speaker John was that in a crowd of Scouts, the applause for his talk was greater than that for the announcement of pudding.

That evening and into the next morning, as I looked around me, I started to see these people John had been talking about. As I saw others getting on, laughing, and heckling the disco from the safety of the balcony upstairs where they weren't under any pressure to dance Gangnam Style with any kind of competency, I managed to get a sense that this trip was not simply another foreign excursion where we would soak up all the usual gumph about making friends for life, struggle with the language barrier and then go home. It also occurred to me, as I sat chatting to one of the people I had played the afternoon's game with, that perhaps the friendship we had started to forge in the face of adversity (adversity in this case being an utterly incomprehensible task with no discernible point) was more the point of the game we had played than whatever point we had in fact been searching for. I wondered if the Moot wasn't actually going to be like this throughout; a list of things to do which give 5,000 people an excuse to get to know each other, even if all we did with those activities was throw all our hands up in the air and go "what on earth are we supposed to be doing?!" It was a most enlightening experience, made all the more revelatory by the fact that it was set to the music of The Time Warp.

One of the final things John said to us was to bear three things in mind as we went through life; I was thrilled that they all started with the word "travel". He told us to travel with an open mind, an open heart, and an open wallet. All very good pieces of advice, and ones that I managed to put into practice when the briefing weekend broke up and we went home. A chap milling around the car park, Cameron, asked us if we were heading to London. Travelling with an open wallet, we took the opportunity to further reduce our fuel costs by letting him travel with us and splitting the fuel 4 ways instead of 3 (I think the advice was more to do with not being cheap on your travels and spoiling the experience for yourself, but the open wallet can accept money in as well as give it out!).
As we travelled south, I was struck by him and Libby, another Scout from Berkshire who hadn't been to the first weekend, talking about how excited they were to be a part of the Moot, and I realised that the even they were talking about did sound pretty exciting, and - hot damn! -  I was going on it too! As we drove home I found my mind opening up just a little bit, and really getting excited about what we are about to embark upon. I was also struck by some very harsh criticism of my singing ability, but I managed to shelve that hurt and keep smiling (and, I argued, if we hadn't been listening to Elbow for half the journey and got some proper music on the radio, my singing might have improved).
Finally, John's words came back to me as we sped down the M42, and I found myself wondering: what was the Moot? Before this weekend I had viewed it as a bit of a holiday, something to reward the adults in Scouting for all the hard work they had done with their groups, districts, of whatever they helped with. To me (as I have said in an earlier blog), Scouting was something that was for children, and adults in the movement were there primarily to help develop those children. But that wasn't how John spoke about the Moot. He spoke about it as though it was an opportunity carry on learning. He spoke about it as though we 18-25 year-olds still had a reason to go to Scouts beyond passing on our enthusiasm and our knowledge to the kids. The Moot, it seemed to John, was an event that Scouting owed to us in some way, a forum they needed to provide for us to get together, to exchange ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and to try and make a difference in this world. Maybe, I thought to myself, Scouting wasn't entirely centred on children. Perhaps there was something in it for me; a 'young person', 'youth', 'motor-mouthed chap with more enthusiasm than sense'; whatever you want to call me. And maybe that thing wasn't about learning how to be good citizens, or  how to care for the environment, or to canoe down a river. Maybe we have been given an opportunity to try and change the world, in big or small ways, and we just have to get on and take that opportunity.

Well, now, that sounds like an exciting thing to be a part of, doesn't it? Good thing I'm going! :)

Funding International Trips - Grants

I mentioned a while back that I had been donated £100 by the Roger King Fund to go towards the cost of this trip. It has been very gratefully received, so firstly - thank you again to the Roger King Fund! But secondly, this post is a little bit about grants, should anybody be reading this who is thinking about fundraising for an international trip, along with some more information about the funds I have written to specifically. Scout leaders who are reading, if you know a Scout or an Explorer who is planning to fundraise for a trip and you think they might benefit from reading about this, then point them in the direction of this blog!

The Roger King Fund was set up in memory of the late Roger King in 2003; Roger was a keen Scouter all his life, and took an especial interest in International activities. The money in the fund is for any young person in Scouting who is making an international trip, and can be applied for simply by filling in an application form and emailing it to the ACC(I) for Berkshire Scouts (find out more info on Berkshire Scout's website here)

Funds such as the RK Fund exist up and down the country, with the sole purpose of helping young people have amazing life experiences which they might not otherwise get to have. If you are a Scout and are unsure about what is available in your area, then try to find the details for your ACC (I), which stands for Assistant County Commissioner (International), who should be able to help you. If you aren't a scout, then there are other options too. Sometimes local councils and governments will have funding available for some things, and there are people such as the Rotary Club who are quite often interested in funding youth projects and activities.

If you want to apply to one of these funds, it's quite often a good idea to get in touch with them first and check what they would like from you. Usually it's just an online form or a letter, but if you've already spoken to them then they will remember you when your form/letter arrives, which can help you when the committees in charge of deciding who gets what funding have to make up their minds. The other thing to do is make sure you have filled in the form correctly, and - for goodness' sake! - asked about anything you don't understand. It looks a lot less silly to call someone up to ask about something than to get it wrong because you didn't want to ring them up and look silly!

In Berkshire, I have applied to the Roger King Fund, and also to the Jack Hine Fund and to the Geoff Hill Fund. Both funds are designed with the same purpose in mind as the Roger King Fund, though I am getting to the upper age limit where I can apply for money from these funds - the Geoff Hill and Roger King funds both have 25 as their age limit, while I do not believe there is a specific age limit set on the Jack Hine Fund but they give priority to the younger end of the age range of Scouting. The Geoff Hill Fund has a very short form to fill in, which I have done and am now awaiting a response from! So I'll let you know how I get on. I hope that someone out there finds this useful; if you did then perhaps drop me a comment and let me know you're out there :)