BELIEVING IN NOTHING

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 23, 2 May 1947, Page 6

BELIEVING IN NOTHING

HOPELESSNESS OF GERMAN YOUTH WHAT GUIDING AND SCOUTING MIGHT DO An account of some of her experiences'in Germany where she, along with others, was sent to assist youth clubs in the displaced persons’ camps, was given by Miss Mona Burgin, Dominion Girl Guide Commissioner for Training and Camping, in a talk to patrol leaders, rangers and guiders, at a recent conference. Miss Burgin said that her fifteen months spent as leader of a guide training team in Germany*was a time of tremendous joy and happiness and yet an experience of great sadness. The camps were much worse than she had visualised, she said.

The people were treated more or less as cattle. They had lost a sense of kinship with even their own people, and they had lost their initative. They were extremely lucky if they had one tiny room for one family; otherwise they shared a room with four to eight families. Miss Burgin spoke of guiding and scouting as affecting Germany. The movement had been banned there, but at the present time there were hundreds and hundreds of youth clubs—mixed groups with ages ranging from 13 to 28. German youth had a feeling of no economic future, she said. There was no hope of • marriage because there were no homes, no jobs. They had had an ideal, and although it was wrong, they had lost that, too. They were without faith, believing in nothing. “Some of us believe guiding and scouting the only hope for German youth,” said Miss Burgin. “If today we have not enough faith to give them our scouting and guiding, then perhaps in 10 to 25 years’ time what is happening in Germany may be our fault. The International Conference at Evian has sent a recommendation to the British authorities asking that the ban be lifted.”