Jamboree Training Day: Clothes-washing – 22 January 2011

Today, I’ve been in Thatcham, on the other side of Reading, on another of our Jamboree training sessions. The 2011 Jamboree will be a three-week camp, where 30,000 Scouts, Explorers, young people, and their leaders, will come together. However, as we are all allowed just one rucksack, getting our equipment and clothing there is going to be a struggle. In lieu of this, and because there will be no electric washing facilities, today we were learning how to hand-wash our ‘dirty’ clothes.

I’m sorry to report that sadly this turned into somewhat of a water-fight, with us all ‘spin-drying’ our dripping wet clothes and, in the process, soaking everyone within a 100 metre radius. Towards the end, one Jamboreer took his wet tiger costumer (he didn’t realise he was only meant to bring a T-shirt) and wrapped up a fellow patrol member.

We also had a hack at making our own video diaries about our Jamboree experience so far though, again, this descended into mayhem; me and my friend Connor played with everything in the room – trying on high-vis jackets, fiddling with paintbrushes… I almost strangled him while trying to show his polo shirt’s badge to the quite highly-positioned camera.

At lunch, our challenge was to make soup from scratch, and have it cooked, eaten, and cleaned up in the space of 90 minutes. This is in view of the fact that, when in Sweden, we won’t want to be spending our whole time “faffing around” cooking, giving us plenty of time to explore the site.

We closed by watching back the video diaries we’d all recorded, and learning about Finland, our HoHo (home-hospitality) destination, where we’ll be staying for three days at the end of the Jambo.

If I’m absolutely honest, the activities today were not carried out as seriously as perhaps had been planned – but everyone had tremendous fun, and if that’s not what the entire Jamboree adventure is about then I don’t know what is.