Everyone Loves a Game of Elephant Football!

Two days of project delivery down and we’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with 21 leaders from Het Arubaanse Padvindsters Gilde so far: on Friday night we met the board and on Saturday we’ve delivered our first day of training for leaders on the island.

Saturday’s training took place at the APG clubhouse in Dakota with 17 leaders in attendance, representing a wide spread of ages and different units from across Aruba. Our activities focus on guiding principles, WAGGGS and promoting the opportunities offered by guiding, and our energisers in particular went down really well. Here’s a run down of some of the most highly rated (in smiles and laughter) of those energisers:

• Elephant Football: Standing in a circle everyone spreads their legs wide so their feet are touching their neighbours. Using your arms as a trunk you have to block the ball as it is knocked across the circle. If it goes through your legs you’re out and the circle gets smaller.
• Get Loose: This repeat after me song. This repeat after me song. Is Mirtha’s favourite. Is Mirtha’s favourite. And she lead it for us during the session to much applause.
• Me too: An icebreaker where someone in the centre of the circle shouts out a fact about themselves. If the fact also applies to you, you try and swap places with someone else and not get left as the last one in the middle.
• Human knot: Everyone holds hands with two other people across the circle (not those standing next to you) and then try and untangle yourselves back into a circle. This one needs problem solving and good communication skills.

During the session we also used some resources to introduce WAGGGS – including a card sort activity we first learnt at one of our briefing weekends. You can download that cards for this activity from here. We had some great feedback about how much had been learnt about WAGGGS during the session, but these are two of our favourite comments:

  

On Sunday we hope to see lots of familiar faces again and a few new ones for day two of leader training!

Live in Aruba and not currently involved in guiding? We have two sessions that are open to all where you can come along and find out more about the organisations. Both are 6-9pm, and we are at YMCA Dakota on the 6^th September and YMCA San Nicolas on the 7^th September. 

P.S. We've been making headway with our trip challenges: today Pippa met Rose-Ann who attended the World Scout Jamboree in the Netherlands in 1995 as a young member, we all did some yoga in the pool for Bridget's challenge, and Helen has been practising her hand-stand in the (relative) safety of the pool.