{"id":1341,"date":"2017-03-01T08:35:34","date_gmt":"2017-03-01T13:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/?p=1341"},"modified":"2017-03-01T08:35:34","modified_gmt":"2017-03-01T13:35:34","slug":"world-thinking-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/world-thinking-day\/","title":{"rendered":"World Thinking Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

World Thinking Day is a Girl Scout tradition occurring annually on February 22nd.\u00a0I’ve been participating since I was less than 4 feet tall, as a Girl Scout\u00a0in southeastern Massachusetts. Now a troop leader in eastern North Carolina,\u00a0I’m\u00a0nostalgically pleased that this event is celebrated by local troops, a testament to its expansiveness.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Thinking Day badge from my Junior Girl Scout vest.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The goal of world thinking day is to celebrate international diversity and learn about other cultures. Many Girl Scouts observe Thinking Day by hosting an “around-the-world” type of event, where each troop displays a different country. Troops choose their country ahead of time and research it to create an educational display. This usually includes a poster\u00a0and some objects representative of the country, as well as\u00a0foods\u00a0or recipes from the region for people\u00a0to sample. Scouts are given a “passport” and receive some sort of token or stamp from each country they visit.<\/p>\n

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Troops typically choose countries they’ve already had some exposure to like France, China, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Italy, or\u00a0Spain. I probably suggested and\/or voted for one of those countries as a scout myself. However, when it came time to decide on our\u00a0troop’s country in 2017, I wanted the girls to choose one\u00a0they knew very little about. This would hopefully\u00a0maximize the educational opportunity and stay true to the event’s goal of increasing awareness of other cultures and global issues.<\/p>\n

Consequently, I wanted to propose the idea of\u00a0choosing one of the 7 predominantly Muslim countries targeted in Executive Order 13769, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” However,\u00a0I was wary of overstepping my bounds. What information did the girls have access to at home? How was this information portrayed by\u00a0their families?\u00a0The educational potential\u00a0outweighed my reservations:\u00a0I decided to bring it up. If they didn’t like the suggestion, they\u00a0could easily choose another country.<\/p>\n

I borrowed several children’s atlases from the Carteret Public Library and bookmarked the “Southwest Asia” sections. At our troop meeting, the girls quickly flipped through the pages looking for candidate countries. I\u00a0explained the executive order briefly and the affected countries. The girls reacted with shock and disgust. To my surprise, they immediately and unanimously agreed to\u00a0pick one of those seven countries. Albeit, I think they used\u00a0the countries’ flag patterns to make their decision, but it was still a learning process. They chose Yemen.<\/p>\n

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At\u00a0home that evening I fretted\u00a0about how to help\u00a010-year-olds learn about\u00a0Yemen. I even nervously envisioned\u00a0some\u00a0parents from\u00a0our county diverting their daughters away from the\u00a0Yemen display at Thinking Day.<\/p>\n

Alas, our local Thinking Day event was cancelled due to one of the organizers falling ill. However, the girls still researched\u00a0Yemen at our next meeting so they could have\u00a0their own Thinking Day. I borrowed several other children’s books from the library, each solely\u00a0about Yemen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The girls read through these while filling out a KWL chart, which stands for Know, Want to Know, and Learned. To start, they knew that Yemen was in southwest Asia (from the atlases). They wanted to know several things: what plants and animals live there, what language is mainly spoken in Yemen, what is the government and culture like, do they have access to clean water, what are the houses made of, do children go to school there, and what do children do for fun?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Whenever they found information from a book that answered one of \u00a0their questions, they\u00a0read it aloud to the group. They learned about\u00a0Arabic, about Yemen’s major crops and industries, about the desert climate and creatures, about arranged marriages, about camel racing, and\u00a0about the differences in\u00a0women’s rights between\u00a0Yemen and\u00a0the United States. I also<\/em> learned more about Yemen than I would have otherwise.\u00a0To end the meeting, we blended up some banana milk using an easy recipe I found on a Yemeni recipes webpage<\/a> (although not entirely representative of the country’s crops, the banana milk\u00a0is a product sold in Yemen<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Though the girls didn’t travel around to different ‘countries’, I think the mission of Thinking Day was accomplished and will hopefully inspire further respect and curiosity in the future for\u00a0other places,\u00a0cultures, and global issues.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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