Friends of Malawi & An Introduction to Geocaching

Bagheera
May 8
2 min read

Updated: May 24

So much for Bagheera keeping up with the blog posts! D'oh! Let's try again.

The Squirrels and Beavers started looking at earning their Friends of Malawi 2025 badge.

This summer, a group of Expeditioners will be heading out to Africa to see what they can do to help the community. The badges can be bought outright to aid their fundraising efforts, but we've chosen to do the challenges to earn our badge which will help raise awareness of conditions in the country, as well as find out about their culture. The Cubs and Scouts will also be working towards the badge, but the younger sections started first by creating masks based on traditional ones worn and used by the Chewa tribe.

We'll be looking at more ways to earn our badge throughout the term.

As I mentioned, the Cubs and Scouts will start their badge later on because the Scouts requested they start their Geocaching badge before we found out about the Malawi one. Although it's a Scout badge, not a Cub one, the Cubs are keen to participate as it'll mean a walk for their Hikes Away staged badges as well as being an outdoor activity for their Challenge awards.

To start their evening, they watched a video explaining about GPS and how it works. Geocaching, in case you've not heard of it, is essentially a digital treasure hunt using a GPS enabled device (in our case, a smart phone with the free app on it) to locate hidden caches.

Afterwards, the Scouts who had their mobiles with them installed the app and, working with Cubs who didn't have one, we took the group out of the meeting place to see if we could locate a cache hidden near the church where we meet. A few of the group go on cache hunts outside of the meetings and knew where this cache was, but they let those new to the activity find it and we did! Everyone was so excited to locate the tiny cache and remove the rolled up list inside. We all added our names to it as having found it then headed back. The next phase will be to plan a route to try and find as many as we can in one walk.