Today was the day for the Opening Ceremony! Girl Scouts always have very impressive ceremonies, so I was very excited. My girls and I got there early so we could get great seats. It is still very unreal how amazing this whole experience is. I'm meeting girls from ALL over the world. The flag ceremony started out with a grand procession of all 145 countries that are represented as a part of WAGGGS. They read off the names of the countries as the flag bearers carried the flag up on the stage and into it's spot. One of the coolest things about the flag ceremony was the fact that many of the countries flags were proudly carried by the girl delegate from that country. What an honor it must have been for those girls. During the opening ceremony, they had Sejal Hathi speak. She is a junior at Yale University and is an amazing young women. When she was 15 years old, she created an international organization called Girls Helping Girls. This program helped to train and mentor thousands of girls worldwide. It was very neat to listen to her speak and give advice to us all.
After the opening ceremony, we all went to our breakout session rooms. For the first session, all of the chaperones were together. The goal of this first session was to introduce us to WAGGGS and it's centenary's celebrations, and what the MDGs (Millennial Developmental Goals) are.
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| Some of the chaperones in our discussion. |
So first were were introduced to WAGGGS. WAGGGS stands for the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. It is made up of 5 regions that cover the whole world. The 5 regions are the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Africa, Arab and Asia Pacific. Since I am from the United States, I am a part of the Western Hemisphere. There are 4 World Centers that are located across the different regions. There is Pax Lodge in London, Our Cabana in Mexico, Our Chalet in Switzerland and Sangam in India. WAGGGS is made up of more than 10 million girls. When you sit down and think about it, that's a LOT of girls. One of the chaperones said that she likes to think that 'We are the global sisterhood of the traveling scarves'. It's true. We are all united by our sisterhood. Together we form a great organization that is not only transforming lives in our own community, but worldwide too. WAGGGS focuses on education, leadership development and advocacy.
We then talked about the Millennial Developmental Goals that the UN has set. There are 8 MDGs that the UN have set and want to have good progress with by the year 2015. Here they are:
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| Taken from: [http://micahcentre.ca/about-us/the-mdgs/] |
- End Poverty and Hunger
- Universal Education
- Gender Equality
- Child Health
- Maternal Health
- Combat HIV/AIDS
- Environmental Sustainability
- Global Partnership
At the Forum we focused on MDGs #1, 3 & 7. I am mostly interested in Gender Equality and Universal Education, but it is still very good to learn more about the other ones. So during the week we will be doing activities that help illustrate each of the 3 very clearly.
After a delicious lunch with some new friends, we had our afternoon sessions. The goal of the afternoon session was to talk about Global Girl Scouting/Guiding. We talked about how we can incorporate global ideas into the different age levels. I was in the discussion for the Daisy age group. We came up with pretty great ideas.
Night time brought new adventures! All the participants, girls and chaperones, were treated to a night time bus tour! I am from Chicago and have seen most of the sights around the city, but I must say that this tour was pretty awesome. Our tour guide told us facts about everything and anything we saw. The sun was starting to go down, so everything was so pretty! Since there are about 500 of us, there literally was about 10 buses touring around the city at the same time! Talk about leaving our mark on the city of Chicago.
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| My new friends from Uganda! |
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| Amanda and her roomie! |
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| The Central Illinois & Bangladesh delegation :) |
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| My roommate, Aurin, and I. |
Today was the day for the Opening Ceremony! Girl Scouts always have very impressive ceremonies, so I was very excited. My girls and I got there early so we could get great seats. It is still very unreal how amazing this whole experience is. I'm meeting girls from ALL over the world. The flag ceremony started out with a grand procession of all 145 countries that are represented as a part of WAGGGS. They read off the names of the countries as the flag bearers carried the flag up on the stage and into it's spot. One of the coolest things about the flag ceremony was the fact that many of the countries flags were proudly carried by the girl delegate from that country. What an honor it must have been for those girls. During the opening ceremony, they had Sejal Hathi speak. She is a junior at Yale University and is an amazing young women. When she was 15 years old, she created an international organization called Girls Helping Girls. This program helped to train and mentor thousands of girls worldwide. It was very neat to listen to her speak and give advice to us all.
Night time brought new adventures! All the participants, girls and chaperones, were treated to a night time bus tour! I am from Chicago and have seen most of the sights around the city, but I must say that this tour was pretty awesome. Our tour guide told us facts about everything and anything we saw. The sun was starting to go down, so everything was so pretty! Since there are about 500 of us, there literally was about 10 buses touring around the city at the same time! Talk about leaving our mark on the city of Chicago.
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