TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER

The Candlelight Ceremony

Dearest Friends,

While our friend Teri was busy wrangling all the younger boys into a Tiger Cub scout group, my friend Laura and I were doing our best to handle all the little girls from kindergarten up through 8th grade in a one-size-fits-all brownie/girl scout troop. Needless to say, we had to make a lot of compromises when it came to, well, pretty much everything! Fortunately, the Girl Scout officials were pretty flexible regarding  troops like ours, out in the middle of the jungle somewhere. I guess they had to be. Who was gonna come check up on us?

I don't know how many badges the girls actually earned, but I'm pretty sure they must have earned one for crafts. We were really, really good at crafts!  We can thank HearthSong for that.  HearthSong, at that time, was a fairly new catalog that specialized in educational toys and such. Before we moved to Indonesia, Lex had spotted something like a cooking club in their catalog, where each month they would send your child a package that contained an apron or some child-sized cooking utensils, along with instructions and recipes for several different things you could learn to make using those tools. Unbeknownst to her, I arranged to have all twelve kits sent to me at once before we left for Indonesia, then doled them out to her one per month all year long. She had so much fun with them that, the following summer, I did the same thing with their craft of the month kits. Then I checked to see what kind of supplies were needed for each craft, and purchased enough extras for us to teach the crafts to all of our little Girl Scouts. The main one I remember required us to cut hundreds of long thin triangles from various magazine pages, which we then rolled up around a toothpick, creating colorful beads that we made necklaces and bracelets out of.

Our Christmas Party

Another thing we were pretty good at was parties. Even when we were doing something utilitarian like a beach clean-up, it somehow ended up turning into a party. And, though we may not have toed the line when it came to all the G.S. rules and regulations, I think the girls got a lot out of it nonetheless. I know I certainly did.