Scouting is a great activity for young people. It promotes good citizenship, it teaches us lessons on survival, and it encourages youth to enroll in social service.

  Scouting was created by Robert Baden-Powell-or simply “B-P”, as we scouts put it-in 1907. At first, it was an all-boy organization, but after B-P came across a group of Girl Scouts, he changed his mind and started another organization named Girl Guides. However, nowadays most scouting girls are included in scout troops.

  Scouting is worldwide except for a few countries such as China and Russia. The main reason behind those non-participating countries is often communism. I feel sorry for children living in these countries because they have no chance of become a scout in their own country.

  I am a scout in Kang Chiao’s Scout Troop, and I appreciate the benefits this wonderful activity has brought me. I learned to cook for others and myself in the wilderness, I learned how to descend safely from high places using only a couple of ropes, I also learned how to save people’s lives with simple techniques. More importantly, I have become more mature in mind and learned how to help others, which is something I did not do often before joining the troop.

  My main reason for joining the scout troop is for fun. Before I joined, I heard that scouts often went outdoors and have fun cooking, camping, and doing different activities. Although my mother has not let me go on any camping trips with the troop, I still learned many skills by going to the weekly meetings at Club Time. These skills are very practical and may be applied to daily life, such as the difficult art of knots. Tying knots are definitely not my favorite activity since they require quite a lot of memorizing and nimble fingers.

  Scouting is fun but also tiring. We arrange recycling programs at the school fair and direct parents to the right classrooms at PTC. At morning assemblies, scouts help to announce messages, raise the flags, and deliver prizes. We also arrange chairs for the orchestra, carry instruments for the band, and help around the school such as sending out moon cakes for teachers and faculty at Mid Autumn Festival. Sometimes we are happy to run these errands because they allow us to skip some classes with a good reason, but when we have too many things to do, we grumble a lot.

  The only thing that I do not like about our troop is noisy kids. They mess around and just do not care about what everyone is doing. Take our barbecue for example. They just threw around the orange skins we were supposed to wrap up the meat with, making a huge mess, did not clean up and ate everything we made. I think as a scout, good teamwork is important for all of us. They should have some respect for their fellow scouts.

  Scouting is a fun and educational activity. Although you often run into naughty kids, almost every activity is exciting and everyone is nice to you. It is a worldwide program, so at international jamborees you can meet scouts from different parts of the world, establish long-lasting friendships and work together with different races. It is an organization where discrimination and racism does not exist and this is why I think scouting is such a great activity for anyone.