Camping with the Scouts

This past weekend, I got to do something pretty exciting. I got to…go camping! For the last month, I’ve worked with Scouts de Colombia as an honorary dirigente – a leader. I have a few students in the troupe who found out I did scouts growing up, and the troupe has since accepted me as their international friend.

Scouts here is much more like Boy Scouts back home (a thing I can attest to due to my countless hours attending my bro’s Scouting events…which were numerous, since he made it straight up to Eagle. Good thing they at least did Pinewood Derbies to keep things interesting!) 

Troupe from Cartagena checking out "El Joe,"
our giant statue of famed Salsa singer Joe Arroyo

Anyway. Scouts here is mixed, boys as well as girls. We meet for four hours once a week and do different sorts of ceremonies and plan events. This past weekend, we had an "integration” with a group from Cartagena. Our oldest scouts, the Rovers, planned the event. It was targeted for the “Caminantes,” or Scouts aged 15-18.

So, on Saturday morning I met up with the troupe leader and the 8 Caminantes from Cartagena. Caminante means “Walker,” and off we went for the next 5 hours through the city with all our scouting stuff for a walking tour of Barranquilla! Nothing like hauling tents and potable water for two days through midday Barranquilla heat, in uniform…but it was also pretty adorable. Fueled by my excitement of being with folks who LIKED walking, I made it through…although I turned bien roja by the end of the day…

"Arming" the campsite

Finally we met up with all the Barranquilla folks and boarded the bus out to the finca.  The bus being a public one, packed from top to bottom, didn’t stop the excited teens from shouting full-voice just about every Scout song in Spanish that has ever come into existence…so that was fun. Arriving at our corner of the road, we headed down the 2km dirt trocha to the campsite.

The finca where we camped was a small plot of land out near Sabanalarga, belongs to the grandparents of some scouts, with mango trees and yucca plants. Pitching our tents among mango trees during mango season came with the added excitement of a day and night punctuated with the wsssshhhfomp of ripe falling mangoes but fortunately no incidents occurred!

"Arranca La Yucca":
pull the human yucca plant from the tree!

The afternoon and night were full of games, including a capture-the-flag-paint-water-balloon-ball event that ended with myself and a few others hurling bags of paint at a row of Caminantes execution style,

Making use of the extra water-paint-bags:

The pueblo-dwellers found us pretty entertaining

a late-night hike to the nearby pueblo where we played more games in the plaza, and a midnight bonfire, constructed in perfect log-cabin style. I fell asleep around 1:30am by the dying bonfire to the sound of cicadas droning, and an hour or so later awoke to move into our tent. Six am, the scout leader blew the whistle for morning warm-up exercises, then we deep fried arepas, packed up, and headed out.

Scout leader Ramiro drinking his morning coffee

 Despite the impressive vocalization abilities of the Scouts, I still heard toads at midnight, cicadas

through the evening and night, the wind in the trees, and saw stars. When the Scouts sang me a birthday song and presented me with a Colombian kerchief, I made a speech and hold them how important they were to me, as my international family.

 It couldn’t have been more true. Nothing like good people, good nature, and a good few hours of sleep to make a weekend Scout camping trip a beautiful thing.