Southern Region Jamboree Weblog

Carpe jamborium!

With less days remaining than we have had….”carpe jamborium” is what we must do now.

I apologize for the late posting on the Saturday blog. I am typing it at 800AM in our BSA HQ after spending the evening/night at the jamboree site.

Amazing enough, our weather continues to be dry….and hot! Today’s (Sunday) forecast is a repeat of yesterday with temps in the upper 70s. I met a lot of local Essex scouts visiting yesterday and I gave them my email address and told them to let me know when it finally rains after we bug out on Wednesday morning.

All of our scouts are doing well with no major injuries. As expected we have had a few health situations but so far nothing that warrants serious treatment…at least to my knowledge. Everyone I see and talk to is simply joyous with the spirit of the jamboree and it is becoming harder and harder to identify our guys as tshirts and uniforms have begun changing hands and you never know what you might find one of our guys wearing around the camp.

I failed to mention a very very important item in the blog for Friday. I decided that each day of the jamboree from the anniversary should have a descriptive word. If you read the blog for Wednesday, you must agree that the ONLY word for the events of that day would be JAMBO-MANIA. As we returned to our routine program (if you can honestly call what we do routine) on Thursday things were absolutely JAMBO-RIFFIC. Brilliant!!! As they say around these parts.

Friday we kicked it up another notch and found that it was a JAMBO-LICIOUS day. Everybody I told smiled at that description and agreed it was “spot on.”

Saturday is the weekend, a fun day. So the word for Saturday obviously became JAMBO-LARIOUS! As the day progressed I attempted to measure the level of jambo-lariousity around camp and quickly discovered that it was impossible. The old mercury kept blowing out the top of the thermometer and when I tried to measure it using the Richter scale, even that was insufficient. So it truly was a jambo-larious day.

There is an emphasis at this jamboree about being eco-friendly and I gave some flag patches to a group of scouts who had taken a 7 mile eco-hike from their nearby home to the jamboree site for their day visit. Being Saturday, there were hundreds of families visiting the jamboree as day visitors pushing their strollers and walking with their little scouts (or future scouts). Larry has gotten really good at what we call “target acquisition.” He spots a group of scouts and I approach them with gifts of patches and pins. I may have put this in a previous blog so forgive me if I am repeating but my standard MO is to walk up to a small group eating ice cream cones and I ask…”who will trade me a lick of their ice cream for a badge?” Every time one of them will immediately offer me his cone and the adults will laugh. I tell him that he can have a badge or pin but I will not lick his ice cream. Then I tell him (or her) that they get to decide if their buddies get a badge. Suddenly he is everybody’s best best buddy and they plead with him to tell me to give them a badge. Of course, eventually all of them get one but it is great fun and we end up chatting about where they are from and what they are doing and I give the adults my jambo business card and a small flag on a stick for their meeting place and ask them to email me and tell me what they are doing after the jamboree.

Larry, Greg and I actually took a little break mid-afternoon and visited the Hylands House stable café for “tea time.” We had a lovely snack of tea and scones with clotted cream and raspberry jam. Very very British! Brilliant!

About 600PM, after the daily program ends and the visitors are off the ranch, the jamboree takes on a somewhat different atmosphere. Units and patrols are preparing their dinner meal, there are hundreds of small groups sitting around in the grass adjacent to campsites just chatting and trading patches, games of Rugby, football (soccer), badminton, you name it are being played by pairs and teams in the activity areas in each subcamp. Everybody is somewhat laid back and relaxing and getting their energy renewed for the later evening subcamp activities. It is a really neat time and last evening I enjoyed just walking around and soaking up the ambiance of the moment.

The guys from Troop 207 (South TX) invited me to eat dinner with them and we had a fabulous meal of quesadillas, rice with saffron, pasta and sauce, and an excellent Hispanic soup prepared by Mr. Cuellar and his scouts. As we sat and ate it was obvious that these guys have definitely captured the jamboree magic.

After dinner I continued my walk around the camp and a nice young lady from Cyprus called me over to the gateway of her camp to ask me where I was from. Like many jamboree encounters others of her troop joined us and for the next 15 minutes we had a lovely chat. The smaller countries are always amazed at how large is the USA and the number of our scouts. I assured her that “size does not matter” and that I was sure that the quality of her scouting program was just as good as ours. That pleased her very much.

The guys from Troop 212 (TN) had invited me to join them and several of the troops in their section of the Plateau subcamp for a “block party.” This was a spontaneous event that got organized by a couple of the troops at one end of the subcamp. They were pulling all of their patrol tables and benches out of the campsites into an open area and each troop was preparing special dishes using the regular issue food. By the time I arrived they were almost ready to start and I saw scouts and leaders from Australia, Japan, UK, Poland, and USA. The Aussie leader kicked things off and when he said “go” the kids hit the food like a pack of wolves. I walked around and chatted with many of the participants and they were just “over the top” enthused. This type of event is exactly what we hope will happen…..spontaneous events organized by the scouts.

After the block party I continued my walk around the subcamps as the sun set and the cool of the evening had rejuvenated the scouts for more activity. There was a huge party in progress at the Mountain Hub stage and karaoke going strong in each subcamp. And of course many many young people walking around in small groups visiting each other’s camps. I have to say that evenings at the jamboree are my most favorite time of all.

Yesterday, a lady who I met in a restaurant off-site asked me “what’s going on out there?” Thirty minutes later…..she probably knew more than she wanted to know about the jamboree. But she did continue to ask questions so I think that she was really interested. A fellow who was listening in on our conversation made the comment…”you make it sound like a utopia out there!” And you know, in many ways it really is a utopia out here for a fortnight. Probably as close as any one of us will ever get.

I already have announced the jamboree word for Sunday……but you will have to wait for the next blog to find out what it is.

Cheers!