A session at the microphone with Miss In'am al-Saghir

Miss In'am al-Saghir is one of the elite of our educated young ladies. She is president of the Girl Guides of the Muslim Scouts. She represented Lebanon at the Congress of Social Studies held in Sweden three years ago.

Last month a mixed Swedish delegation of Scouts and Girl Guides visited Lebanon, and Miss In'am was among those who accompanied the delegation and made easy the task of acquainting the Swedish Guides with Lebanese family life.

On this occasion Mrs. Edvick Jureidini Shayboub, supervisor of the Woman's Program at Radio Lebanon, put the following ques-tions to her:

Q: Miss, you must surely have acquainted yourself with what concerns the Scout movement, given your recent participation in the Girl Guide movement, which is a branch of it. Would you tell us a little about how the Scout movement arose in the world?

A: In the autumn of 1907, twenty boys representing all classes of society gathered and camped for

two weeks with Robert Powell on a small island off the southern coast of England. Powell had assembled them to conduct a new experiment in the field of character-building and of developing the spirit of brotherhood among boys by way of excursions.

— And did his experi-ment succeed?

— Yes, the experiment succeeded greatly. The boys found in Scouting everything to satisfy their eager, leaping young spirits, and they set about organizing themselves in groups of six or eight boys under a chief, the patrol leader. Powell had begun printing his book "Scouting for Boys" in installments, and the boys snapped it up and began carrying out the instructions and directions it con-tained. Thus the Scout movement grew "of its own accord."

The Scouts held their first great gathering in September 1909, when some ten thousand boys assembled at the Crystal Palace in London; and at that gathering there were seen — for the first time — some girls wearing Scout hats: they were the pioneers of the Girl Guide movement.

Q: And in our country — when and how did the Scout movement in general, and the Girl Guide movement in particular, come about?

A: Various scouting associations arose in Lebanon on a sectarian basis. After no short time, that is, in 1921, the Muslim Scouts agreed with the scouts of the Ahliah School to form what they called "the Scout Union in Syria and Lebanon," and after a while the scouts of the American University and the Israelite Scouts of Beirut joined this union. A delegation of 25 scouts from Lebanon and Syria took part for the first time in the World Jamboree in Hungary, and this participation had the happiest effect, for Scouting thereupon began to spread rapidly and the number of troops multiplied in all parts of Lebanon and Syria — which led the French Mandatory authorities to restrict this expansion with all manner of decrees and instructions. And when it was decided in 1936 to recognize the two republics of Lebanon and Syria as separate, it became inevitable that the scouting formations of the two countries had to be divided.

— That is truly regrettable, that the young should be forced to divide their ranks so!

— And owing to the war and

Miss In'am al-Saghir, president of the Girl Guides