The Troop 1954
Wednesday Newsletter

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Announcements

2) Troop elections will be held on October 5. If you wish to run for SPL or PL please look at the website for the requirements for standing for election and the expectations for holding it.

3) Court of Honor will be held on October 12. If you’ve any requirements to finish up, now would be a good time.

4) Junior Leader Training will be held Saturday October 16 from 10-4 at Kiwanis Camp. Cost is $15 and includes lunch. Candidates for SPL and ASPL must have taken JLT, so if you want to be SPL or ASPL sometime and haven’t, you need to. All PLs must have JLT or take it when they become PL.

5) We'll be camping at McKinney Falls with the 1954 Webelos on a October weekend (TBA).  On that trip we'll be working on the Geology Merit Badge, as well as some Scouting Skills for the younger scouts (and I'm sure that the older ones could use some refreshing on that as well).

6) The Cub Scout Halloween Carnival (and our Haunted House) is set for October 28th

September 20, 2004 Monday.  Scouts in the News.

SCOUTING FOR A BETTER IRAQ; AMERICANS ARE TRYING TO RAISE $4 MILLION TO TURN IRAQ INTO A HAVEN FOR BOY SCOUTING.

Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, WI)

If a grassroots rebuilding effort in Iraq takes off, there soon may be thousands of Iraqi boys pledging to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.

There once were thousands of Boy Scouts in Iraq, where the nation's first troops were organized in 1921. Today, one-third of the 38 million Boy Scouts in the world are Muslims. But after Saddam Hussein seized power in Iraq in 1979, his government converted the country's 12,000 scouts into tools of the state. Outside magazine reports that one such group, Saddam's Cubs, offered boys summer camps consisting of 14-hour days filled with hand-to-hand fighting drills. In 1999, Iraq was expelled from the World Organization of the Scouting Movement.

Enter two Americans, Chip Beck and Gary Thatcher, who want to see scouting return to Iraq. "Americans have been asking since Sept. 11, How do you find common ground with Arabs and people in Islamic and Third World societies?' Scouting has been doing it for 97 years. It crosses religious and national values. It's a belief system in something higher than yourself," says Beck. He hopes that through scouting, Sunni boys will meet Shi'ite boys and Kurdish boys, and together they will learn to stop hating each other.

Beck and Thatcher have persuaded the Iraqi government to give the Scouts a 50-acre site on the Tigris River that was previously the headquarters of Saddam's infamous Mukhabarat secret police. With the blessing of the world scouting organization, the Americans are trying to raise $4 million to renovate the site into an Iraqi scouting headquarters.

Rebuilding the scout movement in Iraq is tricky business. While the Iraqis are thankful for help from the United States -- especially money -- they are adamant that Iraqis themselves must lead the project. "You cannot let the Iraqis think that you are coming to lead them," said Fawzi Farghali of the Arab Scout Region in Cairo. "You must support them from behind, not in front."

Already, 5,000 Iraqi boys have signed up with the Ministry of Education to become scouts. But they need leaders, an organization, places to meet, and money. "We could easily get a couple of dozen children today and put them in uniform and call them a troop. But it wouldn't last," says Beck. "We have to develop a national infrastructure for this."

One fund-raising idea that has been offered but not acted upon is simply to get the 11 million Boy and Girl Scouts in the United States to give 50 cents each.

Perhaps the Boy Scouts can succeed, where so many others have failed, in uniting the Iraqi people. It sure can't hurt to try.

Do something: Send a tax-deductible contribution to either the U.S. Fund for International Scouting or the World Friendship Fund, with a note specifying "to restart Scouting in Iraq." Mail it to Boy Scouts of America National Council, P.O. Box 152079, Irving, Texas 75015.