GIRL GUIDE NOTES

Evening Star, Issue 22379, 1 July 1936, Page 2

GIRL GUIDE NOTES

[By Guides.] FIRST CLASS. First class tests will be held on Saturday afternoon next in Wilson Hall at 2. Candidates will, as usual, bring their own pens and paper. OVERSEAS CORRESPONDENT, So far no one has offered herself as a correspondent for the American Girl Scout who wrote seeking a pen friend, and specially selected Dunedin. Surely someone is keen enough to offer? The Post Office is responsible for the delivery of the letter to someone, otherwise it must be returned to the sender. Would this not be rather a slur on our conception of international Guiding here? DISTRICT REPORT FORMS. District report forms will be distributed to all companies and packs this we.ek. Guiders are asked to fill in all details accurately (not including recruits in full company numbers), and to forward forms to their district commissioners promptly, as they in turn have to have all returns in to provincial headquarters by the beginning of August, LEVIES. The annual levy to Dominion headquarters is _ now due, and must reach the provincial secretary not later than July 31, The levy this year will be 9d per Commissioner, Guider, Ranger, Guide, and Brownie. Guiders are reminded that the amount sent in must be in accordance with- the number of enrolled Guides on their report form.

GIRL “SCOUTS” IN AMERICA. In America, as in other countries, the Girl Guide movement has grown and spread with amazing rapidity, and has developed various interesting characteristics of its own. Among other features has been the institution of several hundred “Little Houses,” which have been efficiently planned and organised, and in which Girl Scouts, as they are called, may practise cooking, cleaning, and housework of all kinds, even to playing hostess under conditions as much as possible like those they are likely to meet in their own homes. Among the well-known American women who have taken keen interest in the movement are Mrs Roosevelt, Mrs Hoover, and Mrs Calvin Coolidge, and a contemporary journal gives an interesting account of the latter’s visit to one of the “ Little Houses ” in Washington. She found several girls busy getting luncheon ready for visitors, while others were arranging flowers in the kitchen. Upstairs, in a well-equipped nursery, she found two girls bathing a life-like doll baby under the supervision of a white-capped nurse. When the “ baby had been patted dry, dressed, and put into its hygienic crib for a morning nap, Mrs Coolidge stepped into an adjoining room and discovered a “ patient ” —whose very red cheeks and very bright eyes rather spoiled the picture, out never'mind!—getting an alcohol rub from two Girl Scout home nurses. The rub finished, the nurses dexterously performed tho difficult feat of changing the sheets while the patient lay in bed. . , Practical instruction in first aid, home nursing, and other essentially feminine occupations are all part of the training. The question whether this equipment is of real service to the girl in after years is, of course, of paramount importance, but the general belief seems to be that it is. One twelve-year-old Girl Scout put it in a nutshell: — " If I know I’m going to like dressmaking, I can go to regular classes and learn more about it than I can in Scouting—and the same with country dancing or sick nursing. But if I want to find out what I’m really going to do all my life, then there’s no place like my troop.” The older Girl Scouts agree that the troop’s the place. At least a score, of nurses traced their initial interest in the work they are now doing directly to the proud day they were awarded their first aid and home nurse badges. There are ever so many case stones similar to that of Jane, supervisor in a well-known hospital, who determined in her first year as a Girl Scout to make nursing her life work. . Her nature badges gave one girl the impulse that sent her to an island near Bermuda where, as a member of William Beebe’s technical staff, she was part of the annual expedition of the department of tropical research for the New York Zoological Society,