A Step Forward...

A delegate of The Woman's Voice visited the camp of the Munjidat at Dhour el-Choueir in Lebanon, and here she passes on to us some of the impressions it left upon her:

What is the use of publishing books and articles brimming with the benefits of sport and the methods of training in it, if we content ourselves, out of all that, with reading or with looking at the pictures? Come, then, to practical life, and see, Madam, how sport in its various branches creates not only beautiful bodies, but an entire generation enjoying strength of body and of character. There is no doubt that sport is a veritable school in which the individual learns cooperation, sacrifice, and self-reliance.

Scouting life is the foremost branch of sport by means of which we obtain most of those benefits gathered together. And for our girls it is nonexistent.

I do not know why we do not wake up to this deficiency, but instead leave the mothers of the future to pass the summer season shuttling between the cafés and the house. We never see, for instance, any family going on a scouting excursion in the mountains and among the woods; and if we do come upon a family out on an excursion, the trip is for spending the day in eating and sitting in the café. And so the girl grows up idle and dies idle.

I shall not attempt to preach at length upon the benefits of sport; rather, I shall tell you something of a bold new movement that seeks to attain what we have mentioned — namely, the scouting movement organized by the Munjidat Association. The activity of this association extends over many fields in Beirut.

In the summer it set up a scout camp whose tents were pitched on a knoll clothed with pine woods at Dhour el-Choueir, the greatest of Lebanon's summer resorts.

The first camp began on the twenty-first of last July, and the number of members came to upwards of fifty girls from various parts of Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. All of them followed a daily program drawn up by the camp's supreme committee under the presidency of Miss Salwa Zghaib.

I visited the camp in the early morning, and great was my admiration for the Munjidat when I saw every one of them absorbed in the work of tidying and cleaning — this one sweeping out the tent, another chopping firewood to light the fire, and that one washing the dishes. No sooner had the morning bell rung than everything stood in order in its place; then the Munjidat raced off to take breakfast, and then to the morning assembly, where lectures and moral and scientific guidance were delivered to them, interspersed with discussions of various subjects between the Munjidat and the supreme committee.

The camp lasted about two weeks. Would that camps such as these might spread through all parts of the Arab world; that, then, would be a step forward toward a better and higher social life.