"It was no comfort. We didn't have a bathroom for a long time. We washed at the sink and went to the swimming pool to bathe on Saturdays or Sundays. Sometimes I ran across the street, there was a laundry room in the backyard, and they heated water in the boiler and we washed there. I was ashamed when I had to run back across the street with a towel on."
"The Pioneers used to come to check on us. We had our costumes, our green shirts, and they gave us red scarves. Mr Němeček asked us to put on the red scarves when someone came to camp. But the boys used them rather to clean their shoes. Now that I see it, Mr Němeček could have got in big trouble. We were silly teenagers, but we just couldn't get over the fact that Scouting had to end."
"I know that's not how you do this that I'm going to do this differently. Plus, I've always gotten along with people at work, even when I had a different opinion, so I tried to show it in a nice way. Not to upset the working team. That's what Scouting gave me, that every person is different."
"It was difficult times. I started squinting. My mother took me to the eye doctor. They kept telling her that if she had more children she wouldn't even notice it, that she was watching me too much, because I was an only child. Then they found out I was squinting because a tumour was pressing on my eye. So when I was about six, I had an operation in Jihlava at the eye clinic. They took out a tumour full of pus and eyelashes, it was non-malignant. But my eye fell back, I had to wear glasses, then they had to re-operate it. Since then, I have no feeling in it and it doesn't water."
I never wore the red pioneer scarf
Dagmar Emmerová was born on 16 December 1954. Scouting significantly influenced her entire life, not only because it has set her basic moral values. It was thanks to Scouting that Dagmar met her husband Vladimír Emmer at the age of fifteen. Together they returned to Scouting in the early 1990s and raised their sons and later their grandchildren in the spirit of Scouting.
