One skill that girl scouts bring back from traveling is developing their cultural awareness. We discover these differences when we travel from the suburbs to downtown or when we travel from San Diego up to LA or when we travel from the US to Switzerland!

How we learn from those encounters with people who are different than we are and how we grow to be more compassionate or more understanding or better global citizens is a wonderful bonus to taking your troop traveling!

Embrace Differences During Thinking Day celebrations we often challenge our girl scouts to learn about how girl scouts or girl guides do things differently in different countries. I love to see them learning about the different promise or badge offerings in different programs. I think it’s exciting to see that we are different and to embrace those differences as well as learning about how we are the same.

Thinking Day is a good excuse to learn dances from other countries, listen to music in other languages, try new foods, watch a foreign movie (The Red Balloon in French is sweet!) Learn to say some things in other languages. It’s fun to learn “please and thank you” in other languages and then use those words at troop meetings!  

We learned a game about different cultures when we took a travel workshop at Hostelling International – girls imagined that they were from different places and took slips of paper that told them to act a certain way…smile when I’m talking…bow when we meet…stand close…stand farther away…as part of the way their culture would react.  We each came into the room acting our role and then talked about how it felt to encounter those different ways of behaving. You can download the game here.

Become Adventurous Eaters My troop was proud that we were “adventurous eaters”! We enjoyed sampling foods from other countries on our travels, sometimes the stranger the better! I remember buying a fuzzy fruit from a fruit seller on the street in New York in Chinatown and we loved it! We shared bites of stuffed buns and sea urchin and all kinds of unusual (for us) delicacies. Sometimes it was something that another girl had tried like figs, artichokes or dim sum and she would convince other girls to take a bite. We often looked for ethnic restaurants when we were traveling because they were a great value as well!

The hostel in Point Loma, here in San Diego, offers a great Cultural Kitchen program. During the program you are given a box of ingredients and a recipe for an ethnic dish and you cook together and serve it to the current visitors to the hostel!

As a troop we enjoyed trips to farmer’s markets to explore different ingredients and to taste foods. I remember trying a fiddlehead fern in San Francisco with my troop and some unusually mushrooms at the Ferry Marketplace. That was fun!

Here in San Diego we also have the International Cottages in Balboa Park where you can sample international foods and talk to the docents about their homeland and about food memories. If you’re lucky you may also see dancers or musicians celebrating their heritage at the cottages.

Homelessness and Poverty While traveling you’ll encounter people who are poor and homeless. It’s great to learn compassion and to be “street smart” as a troop. *Daisies and Brownies might read a book like: Train to Somewhere – Eve Bunting, The Family Under the Bridge-Natalie Carlson, The Can Man- Laura Williams, Fly Away Home – Eve Bunting.

Older troops might sign up to serve a meal at a shelter, the minimum age is 10 to serve at Father Joe’s Village. Our troop really enjoyed serving meals at the shelter and I think it was a terrific learning experience. After serving we’d serve ourselves the same meal and eat at the tables with the rest of the residents. One of the girls in our troop wrote a children’s book about our experiences there and illustrated it with her drawings. 

When we travel to LA on the train I like to see leaders talking to their girls about how to be safe in the city – stay with a buddy, be aware, keep valuables out of sight and in hard to reach pockets.  When we were in Paris we learned the hard way when a bicyclist snactched a daypack from under a chair while we were sitting at an outdoor cafe. 

Juniors and up might try spending the night in a cardboard box and doing an Oxfam Hunger Breakfast (draw tickets to see how much you get to eat) on a campout at a local park. Article about girl scouts doing this in NY.   

Talk with your troop about philanthropy and where giving some of their cookie money might help. Research charities and learn how to pick one where most of the money you give goes to help rather than to administration.

Taking Action when we get impassioned about fixing a problem that we see in other places we have to learn to tell the difference between making people more like us (out of a desire to help) and accepting that our way may not be the only way or the best way and truly helping people in ways that will make their lives easier or safer. I think it’s an important distinction that we can talk about with girls who want to make a difference in the world.