The scout method

Two spiritual fathers

Our community stands on two legs, and that makes it walk differently from the others.

Scouting was born out of a camp on an island in England, in 1907, where a general named Robert Baden-Powell took twenty boys from social classes that normally did not mix and left them to manage on their own, in patrols. The community in Oradea was born out of an oratory opened by an Italian priest, Don Orione, who at twenty took into his own room a boy who had been thrown out of catechism class.

In its own texts, our group calls both of them “the spiritual fathers”. From the first comes the method: the patrol, the game, the outdoors, practical skill. From the second comes the reason: “Do good always, harm never, to anyone.”

The patrol — the heart of the method

Five to eight scouts of different ages. Not a work team: a small society.

A patrol has its own name and its own totem — an animal — its own colours, its own corner of the camp, its own cooking fire and its own logbook. Several patrols together make a Reparto (the troop). What surprises parents is who does the leading: the patrol leader is an experienced scout, usually fifteen or sixteen, who is genuinely answerable for the others. He has a second who stands in for him.

Writing about the first camp in history, the one on Brownsea Island, Baden-Powell said that dividing the boys into patrols led by the oldest among them was the secret of its success: each patrol leader was given full responsibility for the behaviour of his patrol at all times, in camp and in the field.

Everyone has a job

In a patrol nobody is a passenger. Besides the leader and the second, every scout holds at least one job, and the jobs rotate, so that everyone goes through all of them:

There is a single idea behind it, and it is a radical one: the child is not taught, he is put in the position of doing it himself. He cooks what he eats, builds what he uses, handles his own money — and answers to a boy of fifteen, not to an adult.

The Law and the Promise

Ten articles, written for children, but not childish in the least.

The Law is not a list of prohibitions. It is written in the present tense, like the portrait of a person worth catching up with. This is the text we use — scouts:

1. make it a point of honour to deserve the trust of others;
2. are loyal;
3. try to be useful and help other people;
4. are friends to everyone and brothers to every scout;
5. are polite;
6. love and respect nature;
7. know how to obey;
8. smile and sing even when they are in difficulty;
9. are hard-working and thrifty;
10. are clean in thought and in deed.

The eighth is the hardest one to keep, and everybody knows it. It is kept in the rain, at six in the morning, when the tent has got wet overnight.

The Promise

It is not a rank and it is not a proficiency badge. It is a commitment, made before God and before the whole community, after you have spent enough time among us to know what you are promising:

On Scout Day in 2013, at the Centrul Don Orione, fourteen young people made their Promise on the same day, and Bishop Virgil Bercea handed them their neckerchiefs himself. In 2026, ten Cub Scouts (Lupișori) made their Promise.

The motto

Two words, and they are a whole programme: “Be Prepared!” Prepared for what? For anything — that is why so many practical things are learned.

The path, from three years old to twenty-one

You do not move up by age alone, but by what you can do and by who you have become.

1. Castorași The youngest children. Games, songs, the first outings — scouting cut to their size.
2. Lupișori and Mămăruțe The Cub Scouts: the pack and the glade. Learning happens through story and through play; this is where the first Promise is made.
3. Reparto The age of the real patrol: tent, axe, compass, a kitchen of your own. This is where you are made a scout.
4. The Novitiate Two years in which you are no longer led, but learn to lead. You move from “what are we doing?” to “what needs doing?”.
5. Clan-Foc The older ones. Long hikes, real service to the community, serious choices.
6. Partenza The departure: you take on publicly the way you mean to live from here on. The first one in our group's history was given in 2013.

At the end of the path, most do not leave for good: they come back as leaders, in Co.Ca. — the community that keeps the group on its feet. The scout who leads your patrol today was, ten years ago, a Lupișor who could not tie his own boots.

What you actually learn

In the group's own words: “education happens through play, song and adventure — life out in nature”.

Knots, wood and rope

Pioneering: lashing two poles together so that they will hold a table, a bridge or a four-metre tower. The reef knot, the bowline, the square lashing and the diagonal one. The axe: how to carry it, how to sharpen it, how to swing it without hurting anyone. You build it, you use it for a week, then you take it apart — and the clearing is left as it was found.

Fire and food

The fire is lit without petrol and without spare matches: tinder, thin kindling, thick wood, in that order. Each patrol cooks for itself, on its own hearth. That is what “self-management” meant in the report from Stâna de Vale: five patrols that made all their own meals, for a whole week.

Map, compass and the road

Finding your way by map and compass, trail signs, Morse and codes — exactly what was worked on at the last Scout Days, with coded treasure hunts. Then you apply it in the field, where it stops being a game: you have a map, a bearing and a few kilometres between you and supper.

First aid and looking after people

What you do in the first three minutes: a cut, a sprain, heatstroke, someone who has fainted. And the part you cannot learn from a manual — noticing who has fallen behind on the path, without being asked to.

Above all of it sits the daily good turn: a small service, done for nothing, every day. That is also where the Oradea scouts' habit of cleaning up the park where they celebrate Scout Day comes from.

The faith part

We are a Catholic community, hosted by the Centrul Don Orione. Here is what that means, in practice.

It does not mean extra religion lessons. It means that in camp the day begins and ends with a short prayer, said in a circle, and that Mass is held outdoors — at Stâna de Vale, in 2011, on an altar decked with flowers and built by the scouts out of dry wood, with the Romanian flag, the Italian flag and the scout flag standing alongside.

A child who comes from another denomination, or from a family that does not go to church, is taken in exactly like any other. The Law says it plainly: “friends to everyone”. What we ask for is respect for other people's moments of prayer — not taking part in them.