Mgr. Marek Vácha

* 1966

  • “This is a story which today sounds trivial. In 1976, I got the nickname ‘Orco’ - that was at the time when I didn’t have to wear glasses, yet. The nickname is the shortcut for ‘Eagle Eye’ (Orlí Oko – Orko). It was the camp on the Babí meadow. I wrote the name Marek on a piece of bark and threw that bark into the fire. Ever since then I had the right to use that nickname and the right to be so called. For a ten-year-old boy, this is a formative experience. Since that day, I was the member of a gang that had different rules. Cvrček, the daughter of a friend of mine – his name is Loděvod - who later became the wife of Petr Gonzel Jumbo, sew beautiful bags from buckskin for us, beautifully embroidered, and I put my Eagle Eye inside it. It was and still is the most precious thing that I've ever had in my life. I remember a pin from a nearby cemetery in Skála which was stuck in one grave. We went to that cemetery as part of our path of courage. So these and many other events and stories really got stuck in the soul of a young boy. For me, they were absolutely crucial and formative. That's what I said in 2003 to Jumbo and also to Kakadu that a person may have the impression in his older age, that organizing camps and going to camps and that’s it. That maybe we perceive it already a little bit in a cynical way and perhaps with a certain degree of detachment. But for those kids it is absolutely essential. Man sees himself as a piece of modeling clay and the Scout leaders mold a statue out of it. If the leader is good person and gives the best in him, the statue can then continue to function and work on itself. I can grow.”

  • "Somehow, what started there in the 1970s has remained unaffected as time was passing by. Time had absolutely no effect on it and it’s still here today. With many of them I don’t get the chance to see them as often as before, but every time I’m in Brno and I need to stay somewhere for the night, I come to Zub’s place and sleep there. I can come to him anytime – he even gave me the keys to his apartment. Something special was created there. Then, one day, we read a short story by Robert Fulghum in which he describes what it means to really be friends with somebody in America – what life-and-death friendship is in America. He writes that it is the moment when one is visiting a friend and when he may take a beer from the fridge without asking the owner of the house, his friend. This seemed awfully funny to us because for us, this is where friendship starts at best. We understood friendship much more strongly and fundamentally. When I went to the seminary Top gave me the keys to his apartment, Zub gave me the keys to his house that he had just built. We considered it to be perfectly normal. This was friendship for us. To this day, I call half an hour before I get there and I know that I can sleep over anytime. I become a part of their families when I’m there. That’s what started there in the 1970s, 1980s, and what has been reasserted during all those tours and trips when we wandered around the Czech Republic, Europe and later around the world. Time did not affect our friendship at all.”

  • “One of those camps was ‘La nuit blanche’ in 2007. A ‘white night’ is not only the white night in St. Petersburg, it is also the French term ‘la nuit blanche’, which means just chatting through the night, a night when nobody goes to bed because everybody’s having a good time chatting with his friends. Then, in 1997, there was the Nuani camp, which again is an Eskimo word. That’s from Antarctica. Nuani is an Eskimo word that is untranslatable. It's a story that’s worth telling. Nuani is the frost that makes cans with kerosene burst. Nuani is an awful lot of bear meat. Nuani is the wind that knocks over sailboats. Nuani is just a story worth telling. It was in 1997.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 01.04.2013

    (audio)
    duration: 02:34:58
    media recorded in project A Century of Boy Scouts
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

Rarely can a man do something so right and so good as when he’s a Scout leader

Marek Orko Vácha was born on 14 September, 1966, in Brno, in a Catholic family. Since 1977, he’s served as an altar boy in the Church of St. Thomas in Brno. The group of altar boys was in fact also an undercover scout troop. Since 1976, Marek began to attend their camps in the village Skála. At his first camp, he was given the nickname “Orko”. In 1981, the troop began organizing tent camps nearby the village Mysletín. In his youth, Marek developed a great interest in nature and he learned to study animals in their natural environment with his uncle – a biologist – and his friends. He graduated from the Faculty of Sciences in Brno, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. Then, in 1990, he continued with studies of theology in Olomouc and he spent his fourth year of studies in Brussels. The study was too much time-consuming for him to be able to actively engage in Scouting at the same time. Nevertheless, he at least took part in the camps. He and his friends began to organize co-educational camps for high school students. Orko passed the “Oikos” leadership course and worked for several years as an instructor. In 2002, he spent half a year living in a Trappist monastery in France. He currently works as the head of the Institute of Ethics of the third Faculty of Medicine. At the same time, he is a parish priest in Lechovice and a chaplain at the Holy Savior. Marek Vácha is also a writer and has published nine books.