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I'm an unexpected Akela for an English-speaking Cub Scout Pack in Hong Kong. When I joined my current school, they said that I would be put into an after-school program. Some options are table tennis, photography, robotics etc. Since on my CV it said I play bagpipes, they thought I was perfect for scouts. This very much pleased the person who had been running it for about 10 years before me, and after one year of horror I found I was being made the leader of the entire group. At that point, the Cub Scout Pack was very much a dumping ground for the school's badly behaved children. They showed up late, never in uniform, parents were unreachable etc. I found out that there were District meetings, and they were quite surprised when I turned up because nobody from our pack had turned up in a decade. I went from absolutely nothing to a well-organized cub pack that now has a waiting list, year plan, folders on a Google drive for activities (so that anyone can just double click on the slides and they'll have instructions ready to go). The way it structured in Hong Kong though is that a lot of the packs that are attached to schools follow the orders of the schools. So the leaders are not parent volunteers, they are teachers who are ordered to do it. So in many cases, the person appointed is only doing it because everybody else refuses. We even had a member of staff tell me point blank that if she ever gets appointed to a Scout position, she will resign, and the vice principal knows this so that's why she never has to do it. I'm trying to make the best of it. Most of the teachers and parents assume that I love Scouts and grew up as a scout, but I tell them no, I'm just trying to be responsible. All right, enough whining. Scouting is VERY big in Hong Kong, and the Association owns several properties across the territory, from campsites to hotels. BP even visited once. It's been independent from British Scouting since the 70s, and was one of the first in the world if not the first to accept both boys and girls. Almost all of it is done in Cantonese, but there are a few scattered English-speaking groups, again mostly attached to English-speaking schools. Oddly enough we are seeing more Mandarin speaking children joining the English groups because they can't survive in the Cantonese groups. They do just fine but it's a bugger to try and get their parents to help out! https://www.scout.org.hk/en/
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Jul 11, 2023 14:05
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 17:34 |
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There are big changes coming in the next academic year, I hear. There will be an overhaul of the progressive badge system - they used to be concurrent, with the Membership Badge being awarded at the same time as the Red scout family badge, the Cub Scout Award being awarded concurrently with the Yellow cub scout family badge, and so on. They may get rid of the membership badge too, because the highest level of loyalty should be to the PRC, and not an international organization. We'll see if that rumour comes true ... https://www.scout.org.hk/uploads/editor/member/CubScoutHandbook_Eng.pdf We finally got the English language version of the program, and now it's going to be changed again, which is kind of annoying. We are expecting the new programme to put much more emphasis on national pride and faith in the Party. The Cub Scout Oath might change too; we used to promise to do our duty to Hong Kong or the Territory, but that was replaced by "my country" to either try and foster a national identity with China or stay under the radar; Scouting was illegal in China until around 2005. Another thing that Scouts in Hong Kong do is marching and drill practice, probably because a lot of the English language Scouts were the children of the Gurkha regiment soldiers. So the Hong Kong leaders are quite surprised when they go to a jamboree and find that nobody knows how to march in formation, do smart right turns or about-face. I can sure get my clubs to line up very neatly very quickly though! But even this may change soon, because until now we've used the formalized walk style of British army marching. There's a lot of pressure to change to Soviet style goose step. If that happens the English language groups will probably ignore it, but the Cantonese ones will probably be forced to adopt it.
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Jul 12, 2023 05:48
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Judgy Fucker posted:Is this the membership badge in HK? Yep, that's it! We give out your Group, District (e.g. Victoria City, Kowloon East etc), Region and the Hong Kong badge when you join, but everything after that needs to be earned, including the Membership badge, upon which the Cub demonstrates decent knowledge of Baden-Powell and that they are joining a worldwide movement. Some of the Scout groups here get very competitive when it comes to having drilling competitions. 
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Jul 13, 2023 07:41
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The big hike I had planned for Saturday is going to be cancelled due to a typhoon, booo
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Oct 5, 2023 14:37
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~Coxy posted:Still had one of these belts in 1995-2000! Hehe. During one of my Wood Badge training programmes we were doing campfire songs, and we had to sing "I've got the BP spirit deep in my heart" and a Very Catholic Filipino got rather upset.
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Oct 7, 2023 02:13
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