The National Boy Scout Jamboree had many opportunities for high adventure and fun.
By Elian Rubin, Special to the Packet
Elian Rubin, a Boy Scout from Princeton, attended the 2013 National Boy Scout Jamboree in West Virginia and wrote stories about his experiences.
Elian RubinSpecial to the Packet
The National Boy Scout Jamboree had many opportunities for high adventure and fun. There were aerial sports like rock climbing and ziplining. There were extreme sports like BMX and skateboarding. There were shooting sports like archery, rifles, and shotgun and pistol shooting (only at targets on ranges).
There were merit badges you can work on. Merit badges give you a good feel of what it would be like to go into a career in that field. Jamboree had merit badges that are hard to get at home, such as welding and sustainability. But Jamboree also had service.
At the Jamboree, every troop spent eight hours giving back to a community. The Messengers of Peace Day of Service was huge. Each day, almost 200 buses took about 7,000 scouts to work on one of 350 projects in the nine counties that surround the Summit.
One project was to prepare a community center for campers, visitors and fishermen by building picnic tables and a handicapped access ramp to the river. Another was cleaning up the effects of mining on the water of Morris Creek.
Some scouts volunteered at schools, parks, camps, and even the National Fish Hatchery. Over the course of the week, the scouts performed over 300,000 hours of volunteer service. This was the largest volunteer service project that has ever been held in the U.S. This built bonds with the local communities that will last for a long time.
Our troop did our day of service on the last day. We were helping to build a trail at the Alderson Park in Greenbrier County. It took us almost an hour to get there. It was hard work. We had to scoop out dirt and shovel it on the correct side and then repeat (and repeat again).
Other troops had worked on the trail, but our troop finished the project. The trail we finished was a very nice trail at the end. It was a few inches deep and flattened out, so that the residents of Alderson would have a nice place to walk.
As a Boy Scout, I do a lot of service work. The scout slogan is “Do a Good Turn Daily” and in the Scout Oath we promise to “help other people at all times.”
Troop 43 scouts do many things here in Princeton. Troop 43 has a lot of Eagle Scouts, which means there are a lot of eagle projects for us to do. An eagle project is a giant service project that gives back to the community.
I have worked on many of these, including making wood duck and bluebird nesting boxes, making benches for schools, putting stone steps on a trail in Mountain Lakes and recording podcasts for the Princeton battlefield. We do service beyond eagle projects, too, like creating and maintaining a garden at the Elm Court Senior Center and helping the residents there after Hurricane Sandy.
This is the last article in my series about the 2013 National Boy Scout Jamboree in West Virginia. Jamboree has been a great experience. It was fun and hard work mixed together. I am lucky that I will be able to go again in four years.
I would like to thank the newspaper editors who encouraged me to be a Hometown News Reporter for the Jamboree: Cal Killeen at the Princeton Packet, Katie Morgan at the Princeton Sun, and Greta Cuyler at Princeton Patch. I learned that it is hard work but very rewarding being able to write for papers. It gives a sense of accomplishment and is exciting to see my name in the paper. A very small fraction of the scouts at Jamboree were Hometown News Correspondents. I enjoyed my experience and plan to do it again for the 2017 Jamboree.