- 24th World Scout Jamboree - https://www.2019wsj.org -

Meet & Greet and Opening Ceremony

Hello everybody and welcome to my blog!

My name is Nadja and I am Switzerland’s only Global Ambassador, but every Swiss scout knows me as Almeja. This is because we have special names given to us by our leaders and we usually call each other by that name while we are at scout activities.

I am 17 years old and I grew up in a little town called Chur in the east of Switzerland. I was raised bilingual, because my mother is from Geneva and Chur is german-speaking. Besides German and French, I speak fluent English and Swedish and a little bit of Italian and Spanish. I’ve been a scout ever since I was 5 years old and I still love it more and more each day. If there is anything else that you would like to know about me, just come up and ask me, if you see me! Even if you don’t have a question, just come up and talk to me if you want to, because I would be way too shy to just talk to everybody.

After almost 30 hours of travelling, my unit and I finally made it to the Summit yesterday morning at around 6 am. Luckily some nice helpers had already set up our tents for us, so we could just throw everything inside them when we arrived.

I spent the morning at the Orientation for all GA’s, where we learned about everything that’s expected from us and all the cool things that we will get to do.

The day just flew by and suddenly it was time for the Opening Ceremony and for us Global Ambassadors (GA) to carry our flags into the Ceremony. My nerves were quickly replaced by anger as I was handed Switzerland’s flag. This was because the flag I was given was rectangular instead of the correct Swiss square, which we are very protective of. So, if you see a rectangular Swiss flag, be sure that a lot of Swiss people will be very unhappy.

I tried not to think about it, while we walked in and just enjoy the moment, because this feeling was electrifying. Try to imagine an immense adrenaline rush and just multiply that by 100 and you might just feel close to what it felt like, standing in front of 45’000 scouts from around the world and waving your country’s flag. As if that wasn’t enough, about 1000 Swiss scouts standing and jumping around and cheering you on!

I missed quite a lot of the rest of the Ceremony after we got backstage, but Bear Grylls was something that I surely didn’t miss! The music afterwards was great, but I went to sleep early in order to catch up on some sleep…

This is all from me for today, but I wish everybody here a great World Scout Jamboree and until tomorrow!!