Doing a good turn

Yesterday we took part in an event called Starburst. It was an event to work on community service. We were taken off the Jamboree site and we went to a place about a half hour away. We were put into different groups and went to different places.

My group went to a train station that was out of commission but does little tours every Sunday. We were then put into two groups at the train station. One group’s job was to to clean up the train tracks, such as removing scrap metal and pulling up weeds. The other group, which was the group that I was in, had to find every piece of wood we could find without cutting down a tree, from things such as old boxes and doors. We had to take the wood and cut them into pieces with manual saws. We had to cut them into the right size because this wood would be put into the train to burn as fuel.

After we all worked like dogs with the saws for a really long time, one of the staff members at the station came and took out an electric saw and got it done 1-2-3.

We took a lunch break and right after that we took a long walk to a very old church. From what I believe this church was built in the 12th century. After the almost three-mile walk, we realized that we had been going to wrong way the entire time so we went back to the train station and waited for the “coach” to pick us up and go back to the site.

When we got back to the site, me and some of my friends from my troop went to the supermarket on the camp and picked up a few goodies to munch on. Then we were sent on grub duty to pick up dinner and cook it. Then after that went out to look at all of the different subcamps.

After that we came back and called it a night. Tomorrow morning is Scouting Sunrise, which will mark the exact anniversary of the centenary of Scouting and should be an awesome ceremony.

Gregory Gounardes is submitting blog posts from the World Jamboree in England. He is from Troop 715, Brooklyn, N.Y.