16 December 2008
Sri Lanka Scouting Push
Posted by admin under: International .
At the Sri Lanka online news site, The Island, a citizen quotes the President of the country in a call for all their schools to create Boy Scout and Girl Guide units.
Let me start by quoting what His Excellency President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, as the Chief Scout, said at the last “President’s Scouts Awards Ceremony”. I quote. “I call upon the Minister of Education to establish Boy Scout Troops and Girl Scout Packs in all Schools, as it is the only world-wide Youth Organization that does not recognize class, creed, race, religion, colour, gender, political affiliations and others differences and treat all alike – like children of one Mother”. This is the crying need of the day
…
One of the greatest men the founder of the Scout and Guide Movements – Lord Baden Powell of Gillwell, an ex Army Officer started this world-wide brotherhood of youth in 1908 with about a dozen young selected men. Today a hundred years later this great Youth Movement is about the strongest and biggest such entity in the whole world with Scouting and Guiding spread across the globe to every nook and corner and the total head count will be some billions of Boys and Girls.
A visit to Wikipedia educated me to the fact that Sri Lanka used to be part of the British Empire and still has many cultural influences from that time including the most popular sport of cricket. With the forced recruitment of children into the country’s civil war this call to have the children involved in a non-military social group seems to be good as long as it isn’t a cover for recruiting youth to the government’s military forces.
The reader is incorrect in stating billiions of Scouts around the world which makes his other assertions suspect, but I hope that Scouting will have a peaceful home in Sri Lanka and become more popular than it already is which, according to the national web site, is over 47,000 youth served.
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