Scoutmaster Podcast 16

And now, to you, Scoutmaster.

Did you know I was a master campfire cook? In my own mind? Here I am, I'm a Weebelos den leader. I have 18 boys in my Weebelos den. And we're making pancakes one morning. Basically not we, but me. I'm making pancakes one morning.

And I'm slinging those things out of the frying pan as fast as I can, because the boys are ravenous. And, of course, one or two of them get out of the pan without being cooked all the way through. And I'm thinking, well, hopefully nobody will notice. But one of the boys did.

He noticed that I didn't cook the pancake all the way through. Wasn't displeased. No. Came back to me and he said, hey, do you have any more with the cheese in the middle? Oh, my. Oh, my. Oh, this is podcast number 16.

Hey. Yeah. Hey.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green. In Scoutmaster's ship in seven minutes or less, which I've got to be honest with you, is more than seven minutes. It's more like ten if you've got a stopwatch on you right now.

We're going to be answering an email from Scoutmaster in Minnesota. His name is Larry. He wrote in frustration over his patrol leader council's kind of inability to make good plans, and there's sometimes lack of imagination in planning.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Next, in a great brotherhood of service, which is kind of a new feature I'm hoping will work, is an interview with a Scout in Tunisia.

That's right, Northern Africa in Tunisia. And hopefully this will be an ongoing series on the podcast where we talk with Scouts around the world. Thought it would be interesting. I'm certainly interested in it. I hope you are.

That's about it for this time. So let's get started. Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less.

Here's an email that came from a Scoutmaster in Minnesota. His name is Larry. He said, I just recently came across your podcast and had to let you know that I love what I'm hearing. Well, thanks, Larry. It's always good to hear back from folks. He says, I've been involved with a troop in Minnesota for about 12 years now and took over as Scoutmaster not quite two years ago. I've been trying to take as much info from others as I can.

Our last Scoutmaster pretty much did everything on his own for the boys and for the committee. Well, that's kind of a familiar story. When I was asked to take the Scoutmaster position, I told the committee chairman we were going to make this troop boy run and the committee was going to act as a committee. Well, those are good steps in the right direction, Larry. He has been doing a great job of getting more parents involved and slowly building up a real committee. And that's a slow process sometimes, but good for you guys. You're on the right track. He goes on to say this. I, for my part, have been having a heck of a time getting the boys to do their part. My biggest frustration has been their lack of imagination and planning. I try to remain silent at the Patrol Leaders' Council meetings, but nothing seems to get done. I'm feeling like we went so many years of them not doing any actual planning that none of them have a clue what they should be doing. So I'm wondering if you have any tips or tricks to spur the Patrol Leaders' Council on and actually put together a good program. Now, don't get me wrong.

I'm not saying we have a lousy program. It's just pretty much the same thing year after year, month after month. Thought I would just bounce this off of you and see what advice you might have for me.

So, Larry, here's my advice. I really understand your frustration with scouts being somewhat unimaginative or being kind of lackadaisical planners. I know this is the way my scouts often appear to me. So let me ask you this question. Could this be more a matter of perspective than anything else? You say you have a good program, but it's the same from year to year and month to month.

Now, it may be that your scouts really like the activities they've done over and over again. Perhaps they might assume or think that they're expected to do the same activities.

Here's something that drives me crazy. My scouts have set up the same day trip to the same climbing gym every December for the past eight or ten years.

I have absolutely no interest in it personally. I always send other adults to cover for me on that particular trip. I get busy around that time of year anyway.

I try to dissuade them from doing this. When they have their patrol leader's council meeting, they're setting up a calendar. They talk about this climbing trip. And I say, geez, guys, you've been going there for a long time. Are you sure that's what you want to do?

And they assure me, yes, that's what we really want to do. And I said, well, all right. And, you know, I've tried everything short of forbidding them to go, but I can't change their minds.

I mean, they really love to go to this climbing gym year after ever, love a year. So I know the frustration sometimes of parts of a program that have been going on for a long time and that the scouts really enjoy, but bore a scoutmaster to tears. What I've come to realize is that my scouts, like most scouts I know, really enjoy familiarity and predictability of some troop traditions. They're not yearning for wildly innovative changes.

I mean, they like what they've come to know. And I have to keep reminding myself that the things I've seen and done again over and over for the past 26 years are they are experiencing for the first time.

If the troop program did not change at all from year to year, the scouts would see it a maximum of what, six or seven times? If they come in and they're 10 and a half or 11 and they age out at around 18. Now the first time they see it, it's totally new.

Maybe the second time they see it, it's still pretty new and fun. And then maybe the third and fourth time they see it, now they're beginning to get really familiar with it and understand it.

And they start to get good at it. And then finally, you know, in the last couple of times they're going, well, they're leading the other scouts through it. So even if a scout has seen the same weekend, the same activity five or six times, it changes for him over that length of time. I mean, he's getting older and wiser and he's developing leadership skills.

And so he's going to look at it a little bit differently than I will, who has seen it, you know, basically as an adult for, oh geez, you know, 10 or 12 times easily. Now, moving on to planning and their apparent lack of planning. I got to tell you, what I consider to be a detailed comprehensive plan and what my scouts see as a detailed comprehensive plan are two different animals altogether.

Most of the patrol leaders council meetings end. I don't sit in the room with them because I can't, because I can't keep my mouth shut. Larry, maybe you're having the same problem. It sounds like it.

Okay. Not a personal failing. It takes a bit of an ego to be a Scoutmaster. And, uh, you know, you can see more than they can see you. You're, you're older and more experienced and boy, you want to jump in every time.

So what I do, I walk out of the room. I let them have their patrol leaders council. And, uh, they think, uh, planning is done when they've just acknowledged the fact that they've planned something.

It, here's what happens. They say that we're, oh, we're going to go canoeing. Okay. That's great. Where are we going canoeing? Oh, uh, over on this river. Oh, that'll be great. How long is it going to take? Oh, I don't know.

I mean, they, they have a very different consideration of a depth of planning. Now, what I have to do is I'll sit down with the senior patrol leader and the patrol leaders council after they've finished with their deliberations and I'll say, okay, fellows, so tell me about your plans. They'll tell me about the plans and there'll be giant holes that you could drive a truck through in their plans. I mean, you know, they, they will not have thought of some very basic things.

Um, and, uh, so I will say, okay, fellows, what you need to do then is let me ask you these questions. How is this going to happen? How is that going to happen? Who's going to be responsible for this? And they'll kind of stare at me like a dog with a new pan most of the time. And they'll say, oh, well, we really didn't talk about that. I said, okay, well, you still have some time.

Uh, let me leave you to working on this. Do you need, do you need any advice about any of these things where there's things you weren't certain about or something like that? And, you know, I can, I can kind of help them fill in the blanks, uh, by letting them ask those questions of me. And I asked some questions of them. And so it's not, uh, dictatorial or, or, uh, me sitting there and giving them a set of directions. It's kind of helping them discover what they missed.

And then they'll fill in the blanks and they'll come up with a reasonably good plan. And I'll be quizzing my senior patrol leader about that as the event goes closer, just to make sure they have a handle on it.

Now, Larry, I think you got a very legitimate point is that you say you've been the new Scoutmaster for just over a year, maybe, maybe close to two years. That's, that's, that's a relatively short amount of time for boys to begin to catch on to this new idea. Because, you know, if the old Scoutmaster did everything, did all the planning and just kind of gave a presented the program to the boys, like a tour guide, then, you know, you've got a bit of a hill to climb. They don't understand and they don't know, and they don't have anything to base, uh, those expectations on. And so what we need to do is we need to introduce a little bit of training and I'm going to suggest a method.

Take five or 10 minutes at your patrol leaders, council meetings, either before or after, and introduce them to some broad concepts that will help them be better planners.

I'm not a big fan of sending them all away to a big event, you know, to get trained or setting up an event to get trained because boys are kind of suspicious of this stuff.

And they know that they're just kind of pretending to do something when they're at a training event, but when they're actually doing something, you give them the information just prior to they're doing that.

And they actually set up a plan. They're going to be much happier. Now, this is the way it would work for me. I would ask my senior patrol leader to have the first five minutes of the patrol leaders council meeting. And I would say, okay, let's talk about what constitutes a pretty thorough plan. And we'll go around and we'll do a little back and forth. And I'll have a set of points that I want to make, but I'll try and draw it out of them rather than just stand there and preach it to them. They'll say, well, we actually have to know this stuff. Huh?

Well, that would make life a lot easier. They'll get it just by working with them piece by piece, introducing a little something new at every patrol leaders council meeting.

Soon they will begin to work right along with you. I will say this from my personal experience, and I don't see this in your email area, and I'm not trying to intend anything upon you, but for everyone, this is really frustrating. When the boys don't do what you're expecting them to do, it is really frustrating. And it can tend towards anger. And I can remember in the deep distant past being angry with the boys about not formulating a good plan. It wasn't something that they were capable of doing and they were refusing to do. It was something they really didn't understand. Now, once I realized that they weren't just being willful, but they just didn't know what to do, I came down off of Mount Olympus where I would stand, you know, empirically and say, I demand you to submit to me the sacrifice of a fully formed plan. And if they didn't do that, well, watch out for the thunderbolts, right? Instead of that, I got on their side and tried to help them understand the process.

They wanted to plan things well because they knew it would enhance their experience in scouting rather than planning it because otherwise I would just kind of get angry with them.

You know, you're on the right track. You'll build these things over time. I would say two or three years is a reasonable amount of time to start to build an expectation in a group of scouts.

I think you'll have a wonderful time with it. Thanks again, Larry, for writing and I hope the information helps you. The scout movement is forming a personal tie between the different foreign countries, a living force, a great brotherhood of service, a joyous work.

That's the voice of our founder, Lord Robert Baden-Powell, under whose leadership scouting spread around the world and became, as he described, a living force, a great brotherhood of service, and a joyous work. This marks a new feature on the podcast where we hope to speak with scouters from all over the world and understand a little bit about what scouting is there and all the wonderful things that we have in common.

This time we're going to be talking with Mohamed Faswi-Jemma, and he lives in Tunisia, in the capital of Tunisia, which is in northern Africa. And if you look on the Mediterranean at northern Africa, soon you'll find Tunisia, which is about the size in square mileage of Wisconsin or Florida.

They have 28,000 scouts in the Scouts of Tunisia, who was founded in the 1930s. And Mohamed Faswi-Jemma is a scouter there, a trainer. He's worked on several international projects with the World Scouting Organization and is currently working on a kind of a link that's going to result in a summer program between the Scouts of Tunisia and the Scouts of Denmark.

Very interesting fellow to talk with. He worked at Philmont here in the States for a season. Here's the discussion that we had. Hey, Clark. So I'm very happy to meet you. You know, I have been in America, and I work for Boy Scouts of America in Philmont.

And it was a great experience for me. You know, I was working in services. It is a place where we give food and stuff and equipment and packs and gas for the common crews. Right. So I had the opportunity to meet most of the Scouts coming to Philmont. So it was a great experience.

And every day I gave about 20 or 25 speeches to each crew. Uh-huh. So it was a lot for me. But it improves my language skills, you know. That's why I'm English like that, you know. Tell me about being a scout in Tunisia. I think I was in the second year in high school. And I had a friend studying with me in the same class.

He asked me if I could participate with them in a spring camp. Uh-huh. And I accepted. And it was my first time. Oh, nice. Was scouting in the United States different from Tunisia? I don't think so. We're not so different, you know. Because both of United States scouts and Tunisian scouts, we have the same objectives, the same things to work on, you know. Maybe there's a little bit difference between something like administration, like some kinds of activities.

But still, there's not a gap, a big gap between us, you know. There's not a big difference between us. Well, in the United States, of course, with the Boy Scouts of America, the scout motto is be prepared.

So in Arabic, how do you say be prepared? In Tunisia, we say it's kun musta'eddan. B, it's kun. Kun. Prepared. Musta'eddan. Musta'eddan? Yes, kun musta'eddan.

Kun musta'eddan. Okay. It's a little bit difficult to pronounce. It has letters that we don't have over here. Yeah, like the A. Yeah. Now, I'm a project manager in a corporation between Scouts of Tunisia and Danish Scouts. And we will have a camp together. And when will this event be? In July.

Okay. So this is like a summer camp for Scouts? Yeah, it's like summer camp, yeah, for Scouts. Between 12 and 16 years old, something like that. This type of thing is pretty common over in that part of the world, isn't it? Getting together with Scouts from other countries and things like that.

It's so rare here. I believe in that because when I was working in Philmont, every time I made a speech for a crew, when I told them that I'm from Tunisia, they were starting to look at them. Wow, you're coming from North Africa.

They could not believe. Some of them told me that this is the first time we met someone coming from North Africa. Yeah, yeah. It's a big deal. How did you feel when you went to Philmont? Did you feel as though people were respectful and welcoming and they were supportive?

They were completely supportive. And guess what? Yeah. My close friend was a Jew. So I think that there's no problem between religions, believe me. I believe that Muslims and Jews and Christian people, they can be very close friends. I think that Scout, the Scout is very open-minded. I think so too.

You know, the people I have encountered, and it's admittedly few from around the world who have been involved in Scouting, all have the same idea. And even though we may have differences, the differences are very small compared to the larger idea of Scouting. That's why I believe that Jamborees, World Jamborees, are very good because it is an opportunity that Scouts from all over the world. They meet each other and exchange experiences, exchange games, exchange songs, activities, things like that. So what's the general experience of a young person in Scouts in Tunisia? Now, do you have Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts or are they together? They are together.

Okay. So if I'm a Boy Scout in Tunisia, there would be girls in my Scout troop? Yes. No, I mean, you will find a Scout girls troop, a Boy Scout troop, but most of the time you do activities together. Okay. You camp together and do activities together. And so you have explorers or rovers for older Scouts?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have. Yeah, we have. Normally, rovers start from the age of 18. Yeah. Yeah. And that goes up through… It depends. It depends.

Because at the age of 19, you can start the training courses to be Scoutmaster. Right. So you can just spend one year in rovers. And if you choose, it depends on the boy or the girl. And if she or he chooses, he can spend four years, five years.

Then after that, he can start the training courses to be a Scoutmaster. How big is a troop in Tunisia? I imagine there's all sizes. But what would be a large group?

You know, there's a rule normally. Normally, for a Scout troop, for example, it has not to exceed more than 32 Scouts, Boy Scouts. Ah, okay. So we divide them into four crews. Each crew contains eight Scouts. So eight times four, it will be 32.

And normally, it has four Scoutmasters. What do they do during the year? Do they go camping and things like that? We have internal activities in our club.

You know, we have a building that we call our club. We have internal activities and we have external activities. So we met, normally we met every weekend.

And it depends on our plan and our program. So sometimes we have activities in our club. Something like meetings, like singing, like games, like doing some activities, you know.

And sometimes we go outside to the forest, you know, maybe to meet other troops. Maybe to make a research about the nature, about animals, about insects, things like that. Things like that.

Yeah. But we have, which is normal in Tunisia, we have a winter camp, which is in December. Okay. We have a spring camp, which is in March. Yes. And we have the summer camp. It can be in June or July or August. We call to 11.

And tell me again, tell me again, be prepared in Arabic. Kun musta'eddan. You don't have to, you don't have to pronounce it da'a. So just write it. Kun. Kun.

Musta'eddan. Musta. Musta. Musta'eddan. Musta'eddan. Yeah. Kun musta'eddan. Well, it was very, very nice to meet you. Right. Okay. See you later. And have a good time and say hi to your scouts. Thank you.