World Friendship - Cubs

Part of our Advancement work for the Community Challenge badge

involves “Contact with other Cubs”. This can be with another Cub pack at a District event, or by having a joint meeting with a nearby Cub Pack. Sometimes we are able to connect with Cubs from another country. These past few months 1st Muizenberg has been fortunate to make contact with Packs from England as well as from Australia. My brother, Wayne Fillis, is the Cub Scout Leader (CSL) of 32nd Bromley (Hayes) Scout Group in the UK. This title is the equivalent of Pack Scouter (Akela). The Scout group is based in Bromley which is a district of South East London.

Wayne visited Cape Town in March this year and helped us run a Cub meeting. He brought loads of gifts for our Cubs – drawings from his Cubs, badges for our Campfire blankets and one of their Cub scarves. We reciprocated with one of our scarves and a variety of our badges. He taught us a new game – we call it a Soccer steam release game but of course he insisted on calling it a Football game :). The Australian Cub pack made contact with us through the Scouts South Africa head office. The group is called 3rd Engadine (Don Bosco) and they are based in Sydney.

I corresponded with their Pack Scouter, Janet Kemp, for a number of months, sending photos back and forth from our Packs. We sent over a parcel with a number of drawings from our Cubs as well as more photos of Muizenberg, the Sea Scout base and our Cubs and Scouters. I also included our Group, District, Provincial and Country Scouting badges as well as some World Friendship badges and our South African flag. Some months later, we received a wonderful parcel from them with lots of lovely goodies – their uniform badges, some toy koala bears, a teddy bear dressed in Australian cricket gear, some booklets about Scouting, Australian postcards and other memorabilia, as well as lots of drawings and paintings from their Cubs. The miniature koala bears are being used as gifts for our Cubs who are doing Community Service this term – some have already been handed out to those Cubs who participated in Mandela Day activities. The teddy bear was used as one of the prizes for our recent Bingo Fundraiser. It was very rewarding to be able to correspond with both these Cub packs and to discover a bit about how another Pack operates. We hope to find more Pen pals in other countries soon!