Dramatis persona*
Helen Chick
I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"! I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!
* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
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The joys of Jamboree
- Showers at odd times of the day (if you can find time to have one at all)
- Trying to figure out how to cook 5kg of pasta in one pot (supposedly requiring 50 litres of water)
- Kids coming back all covered in red dye with smiling faces
- 2oom walk to the loos
- Deciding not to eat the potentially “off” chops
- Watching the older kids lead the younger kids
- Watching the younger kids mature in a few days (not all of them, mind you!)
- Finding L’s and A’s unwashed crockery lying around for the nth day in a row
- Odd dirty socks (not mine; mine are just dirty!)
- The kids’ delight when you allow them to have as much chocolate topping as they like on their icecream (we have chocolate topping coming out our ears)
- Trying to figure out what to do with the large number of excess packets of biscuits
- The kids’ enthusiasm for simple pleasures such as the fact that you’ve put ice in the cordial
- The silence of 10:30pm if you’ve managed to get the troop in and bedded down AND they’ve settled
- The alarm at 5:30am, because the kids have a bus to catch at 7:30, and the duty patrol has to be woken to go and get the breakfast ingredients which then have to be cooked
- Meeting up with another leader to see if we can do a caching run tonight
- Catching up with old friends
- Kids volunteering to do extra stuff to help out
- The mess in the girls’ tent
- The smelly mess in the boys’ tents
- “Where’s your sunhat? Have you put your sunscreen on?”
- A spontaneous rendition of “Ging gang gooley” (and by the cool kids!)
- Kids supporting other kids
- B overcoming his abseiling fear
- The bucket run (water supply and waste water)
- The red-bellied black snake (!)
- Good weather (so far)
- Keeping track of our 30 kids in amongst 10000 or so!
- Queues
- Minimal sleep on the overnight bus trip up (we’re expecting more sleep on the way back, but also expecting that it could be a tad on the nose!)
- The fact that with all the contingent shirts and other attire from Jamborees past and present I haven’t had to buy a T-shirt for the last 12 years
- Trying to figure out where on earth you are going to store all the excess milk (I am the quartermaster and chief cook for our troop)
- Hearing the kids’ stories of what they’ve been up to that day, and knowing that they’re happy to talk to you
- The fact that there’s never quite long enough before you have to race off to the next thing (… it’s time to feed the starving hordes again)
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[…] Jamboree, AJ2013 Every three years (see here for a brief account of the last one in 2010) thousands of Scouts and leaders gather somewhere in Australia for ten-plus days of camping, […]
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