saunders 180: High Drama in Hong Kong

There was high drama in Hong Kong last week. Not over matters such as the environment, monetary policy, or immigration. No, the issue was far more personal and infinitely more emotional:

Girl Scout Camp

What could the issue be, you wonder? Well, two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine the planning of such a benign and happy-sounding activity to generate such a stir!

Apparently, this is the first year that a camp invitation has been extended to Daisy Troops (the youngest of all Girl Scouts). The response took planners by surprise…with a parent needing to accompany each Daisy, there would be 100 more people at camp this year than last year. And, the campsite was smaller. With 240+ people planning to attend and with the expected space constraints:

We could not set up our own rented tents. If we put them up wrong, we’d run out of space. Someone had laid out the campsite in Auto-CAD and it was going to be a precision operation.
Girls needed to be told to not dawdle during activities such as trail-mix making. Maybe we needed to make it a timed game to get through the line faster.
We would have assigned bathroom times.
We had to stay on schedule or we’d wind up with a bunch of overly tired, crying Daisies!!

With less than 10 days to go before camp, a debate began to rage – should the Daisies even go to camp?? Clearly, that would solve the space issues and relieve some of the time/logistical constraints. I naively thought it was no big deal – we could just tell the girls we weren’t going.

But it was…for 48 hours the debate went on with a fury. Emails flew. Phone lines burned. Some leaders heard that older Girl Scouts wouldn’t be able to do their badge earning activities because of the lack of space. It seemed that Daisies were putting all of camp in peril!

Daisy troop leaders agreed that all the Daisy troops would either go or not go, but were otherwise divided on what to do. In a fit of madness, we polled each of our girl’s parents to reach a consensus. After what felt like forever, each Daisy troop weighed in with their troop's opinion. Three of four troops preferred a day trip or not going at all. I thought, "what a relief it wasn't a tie!!" and that the issue was settled. But, it wasn't quite yet. Shortly after debate ended, we got a brief, polite email telling us that it would be too difficult to reorganize everything and all the Daisies were going to camp!

And so, we camped.

Planners did a great job laying out the campsite and worked miracles with the schedule. As it turned out, there was plenty of space. There was also plenty of time for activities - even with a little dawdling! And, maybe best of all, there were no crying Daisies! Here's a brief photo recap.

Lydia and me getting ready to go...

Wow, 240+ people have a lot of stuff. It took four Greyhound sized buses and two cargo trucks to get everything to the camp site!

Our girls, Troop 99, were assigned hot pink bandanas so they would be easily identifiable. They were happy they weren't the troop that had to wear navy blue!

The opening and closing ceremonies included the Pledge of Allegiance since it's USA Girl Scouts...but not all the girls are American. I can't imagine pledging allegiance to another country!