LAHORE: The scouts participating in various capacity-building programmes and trainings across the country are being trained in emotional development, a new component added recently in scouts training and declared compulsory to enhance tolerance and patience level among the youth to save them from extremism.

Earlier, there were four components—spiritual, intellectual, physical and social development—on which such trainings were designed for scouts’ main events—particularly for the annual national camp during summer vacation at Ghora Gali (Murree), said Ghora Gali Scout Camp Commander Muhammad Adil while talking to Dawn..

“Pakistan is a member of the World Scouts Bureau and World Scouts Jambooree, which holds international gatherings of Scouts from time to time and it recently declared the subject of emotional development as compulsory part of scouts trainings everywhere. The subject is meant to eliminate negative approach and excess among the youth so that they could avoid going toward extremism and deal with all their issues with patience, listening people of all types,” said Adil.

He said all the countries, except China and Russia, were the members of the Scouts bureau and other international scouts’ organisations. “China and Russia have the status of associate membership and not the regular one,” he explained.

Mr Adil said the United States among topped all the member states for holding a variety of scouting events annually and recently four Pakistani scouts participated in an international scouts camp held there.

Talking about scouts’ activities in the annual camp in Murree, he said a number of schools sent their scouts there in phases. Though there were many activities such as cooking, music, making temporary bridges, first aid, supervision, protection, prayer, safety, volunteerism, this time the camp management had introduced a unique activity.

“Under this new activity, every scout is liable to make at least 10 friends from the district other than his own with a special focus on the scouts representing schools of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata),” Mr Adil said, adding the exercise proved to be successful as it created love, affection and tolerance among the youth.

Talking about promotion of girls guide/scouting activities, he said though Pakistan was far behind many countries in this regard, the government had decided to first build capacity of female teachers and then those teachers would train their students. He hoped that soon Pakistan would start holding camps for girl scouts exclusively.

Mr Adil advised the parents to encourage their children to join scouting activities as it was the campaign to serve humanity voluntarily.

Talking to Dawn, Azaan Idris, a scout who also attended the annual camp in Murree, said he had learnt a lot during the camp and above all “I learnt that I should control my anger”.

Muhammad Jibran said he had learnt how he could be a responsible family man by giving relief to his parents, brothers and sisters. He said such camps must be held in other provinces too so that the Pakistani youth could be able to get rid of extremism and terrorism.

While talking about the arrangements, Maqsood Ahmad, in-charge scouts’ team of the Divisional Public School, termed the scouting the best activity for students.

“We participate in such camps annually. This time too, we succeeded in winning various in-house competitions such as speech, recitation, etc,” he claimed.

Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2015

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