World Thinking Day

Our Pax Lodge Volunteers play a crucial role in the success of our World Centre. Especially during busy times of the year everyone comes together to help put together successful events and make participants experiences memorable. This past week we celebrated World Thinking Day and we have recruited some of our amazing volunteers to diary about their experiences. We start off with Lindsey Keeler, our current Marketing and Communications Volunteer.

Sadly another fantastic week of World Thinking Day celebrations at Pax Lodge has come to a close and the chaos has simmered down. Each year on 22 February, Girl Guides and Girl Scouts all over the world celebrate World Thinking Day. The delegates chose this day for Thinking Day because it was the mutual birthday of Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout Movement, and his wife Olave, who served as World Chief Guide. The day is spent learning about WAGGGS, important issues affecting our world, and about international guiding and scouting.

Saturday and Sunday were our busiest days during the weeklong celebration with over 250 young guides and scouts running through the doors of Pax Lodge. We started preparations on Friday where I spent half the day cutting string, cutting giant holes in plates and hole punching paper plates (and someone needs to invent a comfortable hole punch because that thing hurts). So after a long day’s work I hit the hay around 2:00am and woke up at 7:00am on Saturday to set up my station. Each volunteer was asked to make a station that represented our country and connected to guiding and scouting. I chose to make dream catchers because when I started Girl Scouts in Arizona we were part of the Dreamcatcher Council. Also as a troop we were always making dreamcatchers because Native American heritage plays an important part in Arizona’s history.

At 10:00am participants started arriving and we began leading the pinning ceremonies. After we welcomed guides and scouts of all ages into the Pax Lodge family we raced to our stations to get prepared for the endless number of groups to visit our countries. For the next 8 hours I helped rainbows, brownies, and guides make dreamcatchers while telling them all about Arizona, the USA, Girl Scouts USA and Pax Lodge. Sharing my stories with younger guides was a great experience and I was happy to see how excited they got in learning about other cultures and guiding traditions. Throughout the day participants were really involved, asking questions about Girl Scouts USA’s founder, the various stages in scouting, and more. I also got the chance to swap some badges and learn about Girl Scouts Overseas, which I didn’t know much about before.

After each grouped passed through all of the rotations the volunteers got a quick dinner break (Gary’s infamous pasta bake) and then it was time to hydrate our vocal chords for the evening's campfire sing-along programme. We sung our hearts out with some traditional campfire songs.

Sunday morning I woke up and did the whole thing over again but on a smaller scale. By the end of the weekend I was completely covered in colourful feathers, had sore hands from the hole punch, and was surrounded by string and paper plates. But the smiles on the girls’ faces made all of the hard work and preparation worth it. I hope everyone had a Happy World Thinking Day!