7th SAF Camp: A lesson for 8th SAF in Bhutan

A group of community scout from Bhutan attended a week long 7th South Asia Foundation Scout Friendship Camp (SAF Camp) held at Haryana, India.

The contingent leader, Ugyen Lhendup, an assisant lecturer at Royal Institute of Management, who led a 5 female and 7 male member participants said: “The group has learnt new experiences of different culture and values from the camp.”

The youth parliament, which was formed by two representatives from each participating country, gave them good experience of amending article for resolution, so it was “experiencing democracy” in different diverse cultural setup.

Most of the participants said that they had made lot of friends from different SAARC countries, which they said would contribute towards strengthening relationship among the SAARC countries and make scouting contribute in social causes to maintain “peace and solidarity”- which is of course the theme of the camp this year- within country and the region in general.

The aim of the camp was to promote and strengthen regional peace, solidarity and cooperation among young people of South Asia by providing them an opportunity to live together and engage in various activities fostering friendship and mutual understanding.

All the participants presented their culture and represented their own country. The youth forum discussion saw lots of issues of ones own representative country and the region in general being in the limelight. They had talked about fighting terrorism and corruption. Stopping war and global climate change were not spared too. Other programmes were engaging in scout activities and cultural study tour around Delhi.

While the group had expected much from the camp, they agreed the programmes have been good but they had lot of suggestions so that Bhutan would not make those mistakes next year that they have come across at the camp.

Most of them said that all the participants should be given equal importance to every opportunity. Good resources both man power and materials should be looked into. Time management and communication gap during the programme should be overcome by sticking to particular time and one common language.

The participants summed up the camp as successful one and their experience as a new in traveling and adapting to diverse cultural setup of living to thinking amidst of frustration and unfulfilled expectations.

The camp was attended by around 500 including 115 overseas participants. SAF is a voluntary, secular, non-profit and non-political youth movement founded by UNESCO goodwill ambassador Madanjeet Singh.

First SAF Camp was held in Bhutan in 2002 with the theme “regional cooperation” during which 550 boys and girls participated from the seven SAARC countries. The following it was held in Maldives with 180 youth taking part in it.

(P.S: Report for BhutanToday)