Nepali Scouts

Most of you will know that I do Guides at home.
This has been a long time thing for me - right from going to Rainbows in my local primary school aged 5 through to leading a unit of my own in Glasgow for the past 2 years.
Shameless plug: this has been one of the most worthwhile things I've done in life, not just as a CV-filler, but I genuinely love it. Go find your local unit and volunteer!

On/around the 22nd February every year we celebrate Scouts and Guides as a global organisation.
I love "thinking day" (as it's known) because I get to whap out my Guiding history knowledge and impress my Guides and teach them interesting facts about how it all began and how it's now in 145 different countries.
(I told you, I like explaining stuff to people)

I've known all this time in theory that Scouts/Guides is worldwide, but today I actually got to see how this is true.

Before I came to Nepal I got in touch with Nepali Scouts and told them I was coming and would be interested in meeting them, somehow.
(Scouts in Nepal is Guides and Scouts combined as one organisation)
The man I was in touch with sent me this:

"On Sunday 21st of August we have one of great festivals of Hindus in town at Patan Durbar square (Krishna Temple). Lalitpur scouts conducting a service camp at there. If you interested you can join us. Our service camp will start by morning 6 to eveinig 6."

So I took my friend Whitney along with me (See, mum? I'm being safe.) today and we went along to this.
Patan Durbar Square is very near us.

It was very busy, because of this festival - there were crowds and crowds of people, and lots of stalls, and people worshipping and burning incense all over the place.

We found some Scouts, and they showed us to the man I had been in touch with by email.
We spent a little while chatting away to some Scout leaders, drank some tea, vaguely half-learned a Nepali Scout song (when I told them I'm a music teacher they were like "sing! sing to us!" - I imagine most of you will be able to guess my reaction to that...) and I was invited to go and visit some Scout units whilst I am here.


I love that it's so worldwide, that they're so willing to accept a complete stranger from the other side of the world purely on the grounds of having this shared Guiding/Scouting experience.