Vladimír Novák

“I liked being the leader of children, and we managed to keep it for one more year. At that time I was already a student of the secondary technical school, and since the four of us, that is us three brothers and our sister, did not travel anywhere for vacation, we did some summer activities with those kids instead. We were writing a chronicle, going on trips, and many other things. All these activities were then evaluated. Eventually, the leader who got the best evaluation was some girl about whom we knew that she had not been doing anything with her kids. She would just take them to a forest and let them loose there, and they weren’t really doing anything much, but her father was a painter, and he created a beautiful chronicle for her, where they made up some false stories, and thus they placed first. I was so devastated by this that I simply didn’t have the courage to tell my kids how things were, and we didn’t continue anymore it. I stopped being a leader in Pioneer.”

“I don’t recall any problems with our daughters when they were adolescent. They were occupied with Scouting and I think that it has helped them a lot in their lives that they tried to be self-reliant. For instance, the older one then moved to the countryside and she had to cut firewood for herself and do everything around the house by herself. Thus it was good for her that she knew how to handle an axe and saw... I was the leader of the unit, and one day I was looking for my daughters at home and they were not there... They were twelve years old. They left the house and took a saw and an axe and set out to the Owl Valley to build a shelter there. I thought I would have a heart attack. They just went by themselves, without the leaders. Nothing happened to them, fortunately.”