Mundelein High School, home of the Mustangs, became a marketplace of the world last weekend when the Mundelein Girl Scouts of the Moraine Council held its 25th Annual International World Friendship Fair.
The entrance hall and cafeteria were jammed as more than a thousand scouts from Mundelein’s 39 troops and their friends and families tasted their way around the world.
Cadette Troop 20 aide Claudia Walter of Grayslake liked spreading culture as much as she enjoyed spooning hummus onto pita at the troop’s United Arab Emirates booth.
“The good thing about it is that a lot of people have never tried hummus, which is a chickpea spread. And they like it. They return later and say: We’ve come back for more,” Walter said.
Children beat a return path to Troop 329’s Cameroon booth, which sold out the approximately 250 pieces of homemade chocolate and 100 homemade beaded necklaces.
The troop chose chocolate because it is made from the cacao beans that are one of Cameroon’s main exports, according to troop leader Helene Pochopien. “We spent weeks talking about Cameroon’s culture,” Pochopien said.
A line snaked across Troop 189’s Austrian booth, where scouts offered snow cones and a “Marble Luge” competition, no Olympics training needed. The run consisted of two plastic tubes, each about a yard long and an inch wide, mounted on a slanted board. The luge was a tiny metal ball.
“It’s fun,” said Jennifer Leese, 10, of Mundelein, who won two candies.
Admission to the fair was free. Games and food were purchased with a couple of 5-cent tickets.
“We wanted to keep ticket prices low so the girls could buy what they liked,” said Evelyn Chellman, chairwoman of the fair.
The money raised will be donated to the Juliette Low World Friendship Fund, named for the woman who brought Girl Scouting to the United States from England in 1912.
But the fair’s real thrust, according to Chellman, was expanding international friendship through cultural awareness.