Cub scout’s best earns him all the badges
West Vancouver 10-year-old earns every badge available to him
Super scout Ethan Hippel accomplished in two years what no other cub scout in West Vancouver has been able to do, and that includes the current mayor when he was a boy scout in the same troop.
The 10-year-old earned all 63 badges while he was an eligible cub scout (aged 8 to 11 years).
Mayor Michael Smith presented Hippel with his last badge this week, which was the Religion in Life emblem badge, and the award as Scout of the Year.
“The community is very proud of what Ethan has achieved and I’m sure he’ll turn into a fine young man,” said Smith. When asked how many badges he was able to earn while a cub scout, Smith joked it was “60 less than Ethan.”
“I was willing but not exactly a shining performer. I remember our first camp out and we couldn’t get a fire going,” said Smith.
Hippel, now a Grade 5 student at West Bay elementary school, estimates it took him hundreds of hours to get all the badges.
“I only got a few badges in my first year and then I found I really liked getting them so in my second and third year I really tried to get them all,” he said.
His first — the collectors badge — came easily since he was already collecting Whitecaps soccer cards. The most difficult badge to achieve, he said, was the world conservation badge because there were five different tasks, including recycling, home repair and calculating your family’s carbon footprint.
Hippel said he joined the cub scouts because he enjoys the outdoors and knew it would offer him outdoor activities.
His mother, Jenny, who sewed all 63 badges on her son’s cub shirt, couldn’t be prouder.
Scouts will be highly visible during the 7th annual Good Turn Week, which runs from April 22 through May 1. They are challenging the public to adopt the scout practice of doing at least one good deed a day.
Besides doing 33 major goodwill projects that week across the country, Scouts Canada will track public reports of other good turns reported on social media and plot them on a map.
“You can submit your good turn on Twitter or Facebook. Just use the #GoodTurnWeek and tagging @ScoutsCanada and we’ll track them,” said Emilie Diver, a Rover scout from Burnaby.
The Rovers, who range from age 18 to 26, are the oldest scouting age group. Diver, 21, joined the scouts when she was seven, so doing daily good deeds comes naturally to her after all these years of practice.
Recently, she helped a co-worker who had lost her Compass card by paying her bus fare that day. When the woman said she would pay her back, Diver’s response was simply pay it forward. In that case, Diver learned how her good turn impacted another person.
“It was cool because she saw a tourist having a hard time trying to figure out the bus system and she went up and bought him his bus ticket,” said Diver.
Diver’s Burnaby troop’s Good Turn project will happen April 30 and May 1 when Rover Scouts and Venturer Scouts (the level below Rover) give away coffee, tea and hot chocolate in exchange for a donation of a non-perishable food item for Lower Mainland Food Banks at the Real Canadian Superstore’s Grandview Highway location.
Other B.C. projects include preparing meals for people in need in East Vancouver, cleaning up Tamihi Creek in Chilliwack and collecting emergency blankets and tarps for homeless youth in Surrey.
And rain or shine in Vancouver, the Umbrella Share project will have the 9th St. Thomas Scouts handing out 300 umbrellas to passersby, asking only that they pass it along when they see someone else who needs it.