Some dust has settled…

I had a nail biting time when my daughter was in Korea, I would be lying if I tried to say otherwise. There were many things happened which we were asked not to talk about as the scouts were being told and it was all over the BBC… Korean journalists were getting onto the internet and asking for comments from parents. I did get asked by a Chinese journalist to comment but I started to worry about how this would go down.

If this bit of news passed you by, the WSJ was a bit of a disaster for all the participants as the site had not been finished when the International Service Team (IST) arrived. And that was several weeks before the Scouts arrived. There was a heatwave that hit simultaneously as well as tropical storms which mean that the ground was too wet and swampy for the tents.

Additionally it turned out that the Korean organisers had spent much of the money on factfinding trips in the years before the Jamboree to places around the world where Jamborees had not taken place. This was reported in the Asian news over the week.

The current Korean government had taken over the Jamboree running but didn’t provide enough of the basic things like food, fresh water supplies or sanitation (basic toilets and showers) for the size of the contingent (45,000 Scouts) which turned up. There were building projects like footbridges that were due to complete in 2024…

We watched some of the events happening on YouTube (virtually as they were happening) but it was apparent from even the opening ceremony that things were not going well. The British scouts left the site the day after the opening ceremony and used their own funds to put the scouts into hotels in and around Seoul. There was a lot of anger that the biggest contingent had left but the site was not safe and cases of heatstroke, nasty bite reactions from bugs and anaphylactic reactions had hospitalised scouts. Other countries decided to leave and US scouts were ferried to US army barracks. All the other countries were taken off the site two days later when a monsoon was forecast.

My daughter was disappointed that she didn’t manage to swap things with other countries but came back with items swapped with Taiwanese, Canadian and Bangladesh scouts. The Unit 22 duck items (bingo reference) were highly sought after and some scouts walked miles across the site to swap with them!

They also had a lot of fun at events laid on by the IST that helped the new event programme take place. There was a closing ceremony with lots of KPop idols and to hand over to the Polish contingent to run the WSJ 2027. Will any of my girls attend? Watch this space!