Greetings from 2nd Lancing Guides! I’m Deborah Lafferty, Captain of 2nd Lancing in England and formerly a leader from the Girl Scout Council of the Mount Magazine Area. While you might think is a long stretch from my home in Pocola, Oklahoma to West Sussex, England, as Girl Scouts we know that it is not so far when you make your Promise and become a member of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. That is how it started for me…oh, and with the Council’s international exchange with Girl Guides in West Sussex, England.
My first visit to England was as a leader for WS96. I took the patrol of American girls that were hosted by the Sompting/North Lancing Guides. Many things about the English Guides were very strange to me at first… their uniforms were all blue while ours were green. Their camp was very different with neat rows of tents bivouacked around a campfire built under canvas. But there were things that were the same, too. They sang the same camp songs that we sang, said a Promise just like ours. We all soon became friends, spending hours exploring the ways we were alike and different…especially our languages!
It was hard to leave when camp was over and when my new friends invited me to work at a camp the next summer, I gladly accepted. After that, I worked at Guiding camps every year, even WS2001 as the first international member of the subcamp team. No one was surprised when I started a project that would take me over to England on a permanent basis. My English Guiding friends made a place for me in Lancing, too, as a unit helper with the 7th Lancing Brownies. This year when my original hostess from the WS link with our council, Mrs. Jean Grevatt, retired from 2nd Lancing Guides, I agreed to become their new company captain. So here I am, not really so far from my Girl Scouting days at Mt. Magazine and looking forward to meeting the American girls coming to visit us this summer. Come up and say “hi!” I’ll be the one dressed in green…no, blue…. Well, I will be the one wearing the trefoil!
