Celebrating Diwali with the Guides…

This year I discovered I was not the only leader who gets uncomfortable with Hallowe’en and so we decided this year to do Diwali instead (we could have probably done both, but our meeting closest to Hallowe’en will be taken up with Remembrance Sunday prep). Our Senior Section had said they had fun when we did it two years ago, and one of our leaders is doing her Leadership Qualification and one of the requirements is to organise activities in the meeting place. So she organised Diwali night!

I had contacted a friend at Glasgow uni who I met at one of the Children’s Literature conferences earlier this year to ask if her family celebrate Diwali. They do, and she was generous in sending on to us some ‘top tips’ for celebrating Diwali.

Our LIT (Leader In Training) went online and discovered a very simple recipe for coconut ladoos. She tried them out and our Senior Section unit got to be her guinea pigs (om nom nom). And we went on a bit of a mission to find some ‘Diwali’ stuff. We discovered a fantastic fabric shop, very well known in our city for providing material for salwars and saris and they were able to give us tips on which shops would sell sweets and food for Diwali and some bindi (the stick on jewels for your forehead). We also discovered they had ready made henna in tubes (we didn’t get any – but it we’ve definitely noted it for future).

A number of my friends at my church have been to India. I was meant to go one of the trips, and ended up staying behind to run the blog keeping their friends and family informed while they were out there. My friend Ruth brought me back a salwar suit which she wanted but didn’t fit her (it actually is a little too small for me as well!)

When visiting the towns, churches and schools they always wear traditional Indian dress. So I put a call out on facebook. On Sunday I was handed several bags containing several salwar suits and a beautiful sari. In fact a few people had bags for me who couldn’t find me (our church building is pretty large!). The girls got to try these on if they wanted to – I hadn’t realised the sari was in there, and tried to remember how to dress someone in a sari – but I’m pretty sure I got it wrong!

Our LIT had also found some crafts for Diwali – the girls started doing their own rangoli designs with chalk and coloured crayons and some of them made paper lanterns which tealights could shine through.

We also had two church elders visiting our unit that night. This is something they do about once a year to report back to the church session on what the groups using the buildings are doing, and often ask how they can support us etc. While they were ‘interviewing’ me we caught sight of the girls in the kitchen with the hatch open. I had opened the hatch to put a tape player with some Indian music my friend had lent me for the night. One of the tunes that came on was very bollywood, and the next thing we saw is five Guides shouting out ‘moves’ (stroke the cat, the slumdog millionaire, fix the lightbulb…?) as they did some ‘bollywood dancing’ to the music! It was very funny to watch and I wish I’d captured it on video!!

We had sparklers which our unit leader had delivered to me to take down that we still need to use. About an hour before our meeting our unit leader had to cancel due to an emergency, then our new volunteer got called into work at the last minute – add the church elders attending then several girls not turning up and others coming in late… it was a little more chaotic than we thought it was going to be. We are really grateful to one of the local Guide leaders who came down last minute to help us so we could have one leader supervising crafts and another leader supervising the ladoo making in the kitchen, while I was caught up with the elders!

So, sparklers will be used NEXT week (a combined extra late Diwali/early Fireworks night).

All in all it was a great night I think and the memory of the Bollywood dancing will be the once that stays with me.

Thanks to our awesome Leader in Training for organising the night, Soumi for giving us advice on Diwali, Ellie for coming to our rescue and everyone at Central who lent us your music tapes and clothes from India!

Links:

Activity Village – Diwali Crafts

Coconut Ladoos

Love Fashion, Hate Sweatshops

So currently, our Rangers (Senior Section) have decided that they are joining in with a campaign being overseen by War On Want called ‘Love Fashion, Hate Sweatshops‘.

And it wasn’t even a suggestion from one of the leaders.

One of the girls found the campaign all on her own, and e-mailed to ask me if she could do it and whether she thought the rest of the group would join in. I said YES and encouraged her to bring her pitch to the group which has been met with a lot of enthusiasm.

Trying to encourage them to work out what they want to do to raise awareness of the campaign has been the biggest challenge. With some questions to help them stay focused, they have now gone away with ‘homework’ of working out online petitions, if there are petitions that already exist and who their local politicians are and so on…

It’s a complex issue and one that I’ve had on my mind for many years after I took part in Tearfund’s Lift the Label campaign (at least I think that’s what it was called). It involved writing postcards to your favourite clothing stores to ask them to use more fairly traded source materials and production techniques.

I’m really proud of the girls, and during the discussions found out one of our members has written to our local MP about the Girls Matter campaign. She says she got a nice reply back. But then, I don’t see any signs of him taking action on it yet…

A letter to Australia…

As part of their International Octant, our unit decided they’d like to become pen pals with a group of Rangers in another country. When I was a Guide, I wrote to another Guide as part of my World Guiding badge (I think?!) through the WAGGGS pen pal scheme. I now cannot for the life of me remember which country in the world she was from. I still have the badges my pen pal sent to me on my camp blanket. Of course since then, most Western homes have access to computers and internet (heck, we even have it on phones we can carry in our pockets and handbags these days…most of us didn’t HAVE a phone in our pocket back in 1999!). Technological advances have sadly caused the ending of the Pen Pal scheme. 😦

We were determined to do it anyway, so, one of our members took on the task of finding us a group to be pen pals with. Finally she was able to get in touch with someone at Girl Guides Australia last winter.

Unfortunately we got thwarted by the fact when we e-mailed it was the Australian summer holidays – so it was a while before we got a response. Then it was our summer holidays. But finally a couple of months ago we got an address of a group of ‘Ranger Roos’ to write to.

At one of our meetings all of us took some coloured paper, pens and each wrote a letter telling about ourselves, our unit and how we are each involved with Girlguiding in the UK/Scotland. Even us leaders wrote a letter! The girls have decorated their letters with Australian flags, Scottish flags, celtic designs – I think Nessie is even on one. This week my job is to send them off downunder.

As much as it is fun to do e-mails, blogs and all the rest, there’s something fun about sending things in the mail.

Which reminds me – I have a Scottish Girlguiding badge to send to my friend Holly so she can add it to her camp blanket! The Royal Mail is going to make a fair bit out of me this week… 🙂

 

Searching for pen friends!

One of the things our Senior Section girls would like to do is exchange ‘real’ mail with a unit in a country outside of the UK.

We have a group of 7 girls aged between 14-19 at the moment.

If you are a group connected with the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts around the same age, please do get in touch with us. If you leave a comment, I’ll get one of the girls who has been nominated to coordinating the penfriend finding to e-mail you.

We’ll send you awesome things in the post! I promise!

🙂