Busy busy busy!

Life on the site is rolling on in a most hectic tempo! I still haven't managed to get a run in, and this is only my second blog entry!

The second dining hall has been erected, and today 6 articulated lorries and 3 ordinary ones (European size) are bringing the kitchen equipment. Walking back from breakfast we saw some volunteers rolling off cupboards for hot-keeping on mass at great speed.

We are now approximately 130 people checked into the system, plus that we have 30 teens, employed by the town council who have been placed here for a summer job. Most are out in the field, building the tents, some is working with electric installation, and some in the kitchen. Appart from that there are a couple of British engineers that are working on the water heating system, and some plumbing specialists still, but people are arriving all the time.

Earlier I had a conversation with a very clever person, who was constructing a device for messuring the flow of eaters in the canteen, to be able to make accurate prognosis on the amount of food needed every day, and to work out the staffing needs of the canteen within a few days. The cost of the system will be paid for in less than a day, and hopefully it will save the kitchen thousands and thousands of krona.

More and more volunteers are arriving from ... everywhere. Yesterday, a young man arrived from Pakistan, and just half an hour ago two scouts from a near-by town, who wanted to do a good turn in the kitchen showed up at my door. My son Mike, who is staying with me this week, helped Lizzy from the English contingency to put up her tent next to ours, and swopped a super nice badge for a cub pin and toggle. He was super happy!

Yesterday we got our super smart staff outfit, exclusive for the Site Crew: Snickers pirate trousers and a polo with very handy pockets for may 2 (two) function phones and com-radio. Pictures will be included when I have time.

Gotta run! Lunch is being served in a few moments, and then Mike and I will have the afternoon off to explore Kristianstad.

Pre-jamboree notes

Amazing, I've been on site for three days, and my aim was to blog and publish a few pictures every day, but it's been mad!
When I arrived on Saturday, we spent the day in the army barracks with loads of members from the planning team, trying to get heads and tails on things. When the Site Service HQ was up we moved up here. Not that it was ready, it still isn't, but there are so many other priorities, and still very few hands. Anyway, now the rain and the wind isn't blowing through the gaps between the modules anymore, but we still don't have any water which complicates matters a bit.

This week we are responsible for not cooking but serving three meals and three snacks a-day to our crew of mainly plumbers and land surveyors and their helpers. At the moment there are about 40 people on site. Today the kitchen is going up. Stupidly, I thought that the humungous tent that was being set up on Saturday was the kitchen and that the two dining halls would go up either side. But this morning I found out that that massive tent WAS one of the dining halls, and an even more humungous tent is coming up beside it and THAT's the kitchen!

We are also responsible for setting up routines for checking in all the functionaries and specialists. We've stacked the temporary tuck shop and tomorrow we are going to build and furnish the builder's recreation area. Signs to be printed for smoking areas, assembly points, emergency plans, caravan places and lots and lots more. Yesterday I was working for 16 hours. Tonight is the first time it's fairly quiet. As I'm alone on the Support Team, I have to put the evening snack out too, but then I'm going to bed early.

I'll try to Bambuse  a little bit as well at some points. And one of the guys here have made a great film of how the big kitchen is being put up, that I'm hoping to be able to link to some time in the future, but the connection at the moment is less than brilliant. Hopefully, we'll get a better connection on Monday....

Now it's only three months to go!!!

Jamboree TV

Changing the world- the official Jamboree song

The Swedish/Ethiopian singer Daniel Lemma has written the official jamboree song for the 2011 Jamboree in Sweden. Daniel was very much surprised when he was asked, as he has no relation to the scout movement, but he wrote the song, picking up on the idea of solidarity in the movement.

It's a great song, isn't it!?

Crisis management

The meeting this week was about urban survival, or less dramatically put; crisis management. Almost 6 years ago, just after the Tsunami hit Thailand and a relatively large number of Swedes had to struggle for survival in Thailand, a violent storm hit the south of Sweden with unbelievable devastation as a result. Boats and piers were smashed to smithereens, roofs and sheds were lifted off the ground, and in some places electricity was gone for a week or more. Eight people perished in the storm, several farmers went bankrupt in the aftermath, some tragically committed suicide. The material damage has more or less been restored, and most of the forests replanted. Six years later the saw mills have finally managed to take care of most of the fallen logs.
Even the urban areas were hit hard, with black-outs and blocked roads. The scouts, now between 15 and 19, remembered the event very well; one of them told us how they huddled together in candle light in one room to keep warm, and how everything in the freezer had gone off, another how his cousins for two weeks after the storm had come to visit to use the shower and wash their clothes as their power hadn't been restored.
So we talked about how to prepare for a similar event, and the scouts are now going to evaluate how well prepared their households are for a new crisis, using the official guidelines.
Water is a big issue in a situation like this, and the scouts were asked to prioritize the usage of the minimum amount of water per day, estimated to 5 liters a day per person. A huge, and sometimes heated discussion led to that 2,5 liters were saved for cooking and drinking water as "it's better to be well and in your right mind so be able to make good decisions than to have clean underwear", 1 liter for personal hygiene, 1 liter for washing up and half a liter for washing clothes. Thinking about that too many people in the world have only this amount of water, or less, for survival, and not only clean water, also led us to talk about how to save water in our everyday life (An average Swedish household use between 400-500 liters of drinking water per day, 184 liters per person per day in 2008! where of 45 liters of hot water!)
It is usually easier to recruit Cubs than Challengers, but perhaps it is only because we don't do enough recruiting... this term we've had two new recruits! One of them is completely new to scouting, one has been a scout in her old homeland and, I hope, will bring new perspectives to our group. Now we have to rise to the challenge of making them feel included, welcome and keep the meetings interesting enough for them to want to stay on!

JOTI in progress

About 30 scouts from two groups got together to chat with others over the net. After some slight initial shyness most chatted away.
Both my PC and MAC came to very good use, but I spend more time doing ITC support. Got a few words with our mate Nick from Porthill who managed to find my daughter online! what are the odds?

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.9