"Scoots": take 1

Like most mornings, I walked down the main road from my house to the mayor’s office. Like most mornings, I was greeted by several groups of young children as I went. “Farida! Good morning! Hello! Hello Farida!” Unlike most mornings, though, there were not just the usual neighborhood kids. As I approached the mairie, I saw more and more kids. “Farida! There are people at the mairie!” I was starting to get a little bit nervous. As I got closer, I began to hear the rumble of hundreds of little voices. Uh Oh.

Then I turned the corner, and saw them. Easily 1,000 children, all around the mairie. They were up on the hill, in the trees, on the steps. And then they saw me. “FARIIIDAAAAA!!!!!!!!” sounded like a war cry. Good Lord… Within seconds I was surrounded, slightly terrified, thinking both; this is ridiculous, and how in the world are we going to deal with this?? I had to laugh. What else could you do?

It was Saturday, and earlier that week I had gone to the schools, the elementary and middle school and told them that we would be having a meeting on Saturday for any kids interested in joining the new scouts groups. I was beginning to regret making an open invitation…

“Farida is having a party.”

“Farida is going to kill a goat for us.”

I sadly realized that the vast majority of these kids didn’t understand what the meeting was about. They had simply come because I had asked them to. I was doing something, and apparently I’m very interesting.

I went into the mairie and saw the mayor and the SG (Secretaire Generale), who were both chuckling. Thank God. They could easily have been annoyed at the situation, but to my great relief they both found it as amusing as I did. But let’s get serious now, we need to talk strategy.

Even if you have never had to get over 1,000 young children to listen and do what you want them to, I’m sure you can imagine what a difficult task that could be. We decided that we would keep the middle school kids for the meeting, as a reasonable number of them had turned up. We would have to send away the younger kids, and then the following week we would ask the school director to choose 10, 5 girls and 5 boys. The trick would be getting them to leave, now.

The mayor went outside to face the masses. “The guest isn’t coming today. We can’t have the meeting now. You all need to go home.” He made this announcement several times over, but still some of the older kids had to help round up the kids and herd them back towards the village. It was insane.

Finally, we were left with about 40 older kids, ages 12-18. Ary, who works in the city for the government and does youth development stuff, got to the mairie a mere 20 minutes after the majority of kids had left. The first scouts meeting went well, considering the craziness of that morning… Ary explained to the kids a bit about what it meant to be a scout (“scoot-ism” as they call it…), they sang some songs, played some games, and we planned the next meeting where we would form the scout groups based on age. The kids were incredibly excited about all of this, which was a great feeling. What had started out as an enormous disaster had somehow turned into a successful first step in my first project. We were on our way to forming scout groups in our village, creating youth groups that teach responsible citizenship, emphasize the importance of volunteer work, and promote equity between girls and boys. Finally, I thought, I’m doing something.