Meet the Russians
Chamboree has played host to several international groups for the duration of the camp, and for one day only, today a group of Russian Scouts came to visit.
Originating from a combination of St Petersburg and Kazan, there are 44 Scouts and 10 leaders in total. For the past week they have been staying with Penycae Scouts’s Headquarters in Wrexham, enjoying the local sights such as Caernarfon Castle and the Llangollen canal. After visiting Chamboree, they intend to stay with another group in Milton Keynes, before heading down further south to see Gilwell Park and Brownsea Island.
The Daily Joust overcame the large linguistic challenge to speak to some of the Scouts and their leaders. By far the most capable in English was their leader, Natascha. We asked Natascha what had brought her group to the UK. “In 1991, after the collapse of the USSR, Scouting in Russia was basically non-existent – it had only existed before the revolution, 80 years before. To help us re-build the lost knowledge, we turned to UK Scouts, who came to Russia to train us in Scouting. Around 1992 or 1993, I’m not sure which, I was invited to the UK to set up a support group for Russian Scouting. It was in these initial trips that I forged strong links with the UK Scouts. By now, this is my fourth trip to the UK, although I have never to been to Wales before.”
Natascha was impressed by Chamboree. “I’ve never seen anything like this, this sort of large camp is not available in Russia – everything there is on a more smaller scale.” While The Daily Joust did attempt to go through the usual tried and tested routine of filler questions, this was severely hampered by the fact that the Russian Scouts had only been on site for 20 minutes! However, Natascha did draw some contrasts with Scouting in Russia. “Our style is more basic, but more extreme. We like to go deep into the woods, camp rough, build wildfires, bridges across gorges, that sort of thing”.
Some Russian Scouts were also on hand to be interviewed. However, either they had been reading too much spy fiction on their inbound flight or had misunderstood the question, for they refused to be identified by anything other than their codenames. They were Skunk, 15, Bee, 14, Lemur, 14, Lynx, 13, and Butterfly, 15. Skunk was the best at speaking English, so he did most of the quotations. “We think the camp is very good, and we’ve really enjoyed our week so far. The countryside around Caernarfon was beautiful.”
