Congratulations to Year 10 student, Nyajima on being presented with the Baden-Powell award (BPA), the highest award given out by the Girl Guides movement. Nyajima attends the 11th Ballarat Girl Guides and received the BPA at their recent presentation evening.

The BPA is one of Guiding’s peak achievement awards and is named after the founder, Robert Baden-Powell. The award requirements are that each girl completes three challenges in each of six of the seven fundamentals of the Australian Guide Program - Promise and Law, Service, Guiding Traditions, World Guiding, Outdoors and Patrol System. The seventh fundamental is Leadership which is integral to all of the other areas.

Completing BPA during the COVID-19 pandemic has been challenging for Nyajima, but she forged ahead and undertook many activities and learnt many new skills.  Some of her achievements were to lead a real campfire experience for her fellow Girl Guides, demonstrate how to make a light-weight ballista from bamboo stakes and rubber-band lashings on GGTV (the Girl Guides YouTube channel), going abseiling, sailing and gaining her Boating 2 badge in canoeing. She also organised a night where her mother and auntie demonstrated the cooking of African food. The Guides enjoyed making yot-yot, a flat bread and making couscous the traditional way, not out of a packet. During Zoom meetings Nyajima demonstrated how to make sushi from Japan and used a PowerPoint presentation to teach the Guides something about ‘Our Cabana’, the Guide World Centre in Mexico and Mexican traditions. During another Zoom session, Nyajima met with a large group of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts from the Asia Pacific Region. This was organised by a leader from Malaya and at least fifteen different countries were represented. 

Nyajima is a Patrol Leader and represents her patrol well at Patrol Leaders’ Council. She has led her Patrol to build a ballista from poles, ropes and lashings to fire water bombs at our local Scouts and organised a successful indoor rock-climbing activity for her unit. This involved booking the venue (and changing the date many times due to COVID-19 restrictions), preparing the risk assessment and completing the correct paperwork. With the other BPA Guides, Nyajima planned and enjoyed a special Girls’ Day Out – something they had not done before.

Nyajima began Guides as a seven year old with Eureka Butterfly Guides. Since then, she has grown in confidence and consciously developed her leadership skills. Nyajima is also working on her Bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award this year as part of the BalCC Micah 6:8 program. Well done Nyajima.

We love to hear about our student’s achievements, so if you would like to share information and photos of achievements, please email connect@balcc.vic.edu.au