Showing friendship on Scouting’s birthday

It’s been 100 years since the very first official Boy Scout camping trip!!! Yesterday morning every Scout participating in the Jamboree took part in a “Sunrise Ceremony” celebrating the 100th anniversary of Baden-Powell’s first Scouting experiment. What an experience!

Two scouts from each of the 158 countries participating were chosen to go to Brownsea Island, the birthplace of Scouting, on Tuesday night to wake up the next day and re-enact the very first Scouting sunrise ever. The rest of the Scouts were in the arena watching it all happen.

The Chief Scout of the United Kingdom, Peter Duncan, blew the actual “Kudu Horn” that Baden-Powell blew a century ago. As he blew it three times, just like Baden-Powell did, more than 300 Scouts on Brownsea Island gathered around the circle of the world crest emblem to celebrate this wonderful event.

After this, they had some dancing from different Scouts with a whole program going on. Towards the end of the ceremony the dancers started to wave paper doves in the air as a sign of peace. Then, within five minutes, real doves were flying all over the arena. This was a very beautiful sight to see.

Then the announcers told us to shake the hand of the man or woman on our left and our right to show friendship. For the next half-hour, we were challenged to get 100 signatures on this brand new neckerchief they gave us that says “Scouting Sunrise” on it. This I enjoyed very much because it showed how people from all over the world can work together for peace and friendship.

As the motto of the Jamboree goes: “One World, One Promise.”

After the show they had religious services for everyone to start off the new century of Scouting on the right foot. I attended the service for the Eastern Orthodox faith, which was made up of mainly Greek Scouts and Russian Scouts.

Towards the later half of the day, all of the American Troops handed out popcorn to whoever stopped by to have some, because each country there had a food sample festival, and popcorn is an American-invented snack.

At night we were at a “Gifts for Peace” concert, which was another celebration for the centenary of Scouting. Instead of Madonna coming, Madooona came, and instead of Coldplay, we had Cool Play. It was a nice concert to go to though.

Then we came back to our campsites and called it a day. Today our activities were canceled due to a lack of buses. The activity was called Splash. I heard a lot of good things about this event and the people from Splash said that they were going to make it up to us.

Looks like I have the rest of the day to look around the Jamboree some more.

Gregory Gounardes is submitting blog posts from the World Jamboree in England. He is from Troop 715, Brooklyn, N.Y.