The Goose Network Camp Staff Seminar 2009 was held at Ingelsrud Scout Center in Norway during the Easter holidays. There were participants from scout centers in Norway (Ingelsrud), Denmark (Naesbycenter and Houens Odde), the Netherlands (Buitenzorg and Rotterdam), and Germany (Bucher Berg and Burg Rieneck).
Ingelsrud is located about 1.5 to 2 hours away from Oslo, very close to the Swedish border. The Scout Center is accessible via a dirt road, of at least a kilometer from the regular asphalt road. It is a quiet place.
The center consists of a couple of buildings: a white main building, a smaller building (stabburet) a large barn and a couple of sheds along the road. To camp out, there are a few large grass fields on a slope, overlooking a large lake with a beach to take a swim.
The main building has a living room, a meeting room, a kitchen, upstairs there are two floors of bedrooms with stacked beds and sanitary facilities. The smaller building was a store for food in earlier ages, but has been transformed into a communal bedroom with two continuous mattresses along the walls. You can sleep there with at least 20 but rumor has it that 40 is also possible.
The large barn has multiple floors and is huge! In the basement there is a blacksmith and a sewage cleaning facility, at the ground floor there is a dining hall (good for 100 people) and a large kitchen.
On the second floor there is a horizontal climbing wall with increasing angle to make it more difficult. There is a lot of room to store all kinds of equipment and stuff needed for the activities in the summer. The outside of the barn can be used as an abseil-wall (14m). It left an organised impression on us. But having the space to separate all the materials into different boxes helps a lot to avoid chaos.
The camp site are large fields, not splitted up in any way into smaller sections for individual troops. At the bottom of the slope there is a lake, with a swimming-beach. The site has a small building with toilets connected to a septic tank. At the top of one of the camp-sites they have built a small church made of wood, just before a national Jamboree a few years ago. To the side of the campsite there is am extensive survival course (hinderløype) where you will get wet and dirty guaranteed. You will encounter mud-baths and green-soap on slopes along the way. Just 15 minutes away there is a smaller camping site with two smaller open air huts to be used to sleep in. It also has a lake (not to swim here: leeches!). They have a pile of pioneering-wood that can be used by the troops. If there are not enough poles, then you can get more from the woods.
The activities offered at Ingelsrud are varied. Almost all activities are included in the camping price (as far as we understood). You can swim, or go canoing. You can always go hiking of course. For climbing freaks there is the climbing wall and the abseil-wall. And lots of other activities for which we have seen the ready-made boxes. A lot of the activities are assisted by the Ingelsrud Staff.
Talking about the staff: In Norwegian they call themselves 'skogvokter', which, according to the dictionary, translates into English as 'gamekeeper' or 'forest ranger/forest guard', the latter is the translation preferred by the Norwegians.
Running along the campsite there is a considerable stream of water, with at least 3-4 m of height difference over a short distance. A good location for a hydro powered electricity generator. In the past there has been a watermill at this location, as can be seen from the concrete foundation. In the basement of the barn there is a small sewage treatment plant. All wash-water is treated first before it is allowed to flow out. Unfortunately this takes a lot of energy and the capacity is limited.
The workshops of the CSS were about group dynamics, communication, roles of people in a group and cultural differences. Each participating Scout Center presented their own center (My Country, My Center), and specific ideas (or best practices) from the centers were exchanged during the Market of Possibilities workshop. We have also looked at the Ingelsrud Scout Center from the point of view of the other centers to see whether Ingelsrud can adopt best practices from other centers and make it even more ecological friendly. From that workshop the hydro power was obvious, but there were more south facing walls that could be equipped with solar boilers. Another suggestion was to do controlled garbage separation to reduce cost of trash disposal. We also revamped the list of activities for the Goose Game and the ICD this summer.
Things we haven't mentioned yet: The 'stampen': the jacuzzi with wood-stove. Sitting in a warm bath at 0100 hours at night with a full moon overhead is great. Fluid cheese from large tubes (bacon flavour, shrimp flavour) to be put on bread seems to be the way they do it in Scandinavia. And caviar like that too. We found that a large difference between the scout centers is that the Scandinavian centers offer a lot of staff-supported activities and those in middle Europe do not.
We had a lot of fun, and hope to meet the participants again on our respective scout centers.
Photos of the event can be seen here.
Yours in Scouting,
Olaf, Ilse en Ysbrand (from Scout Center Buitenzorg, The Netherlands)