Everything is in place to enjoy a morning trip to the Zoo in Juigalpa with the participants of the Activities Club, their mothers and the staff of the Activities Club. All 18 people are there!
Christmas Day is upon us. We received funding for an outing from the Netherlands, and we chose to visit the Juigalpa Zoo for our final outing of 2019. We received some local contributions as well: friends of Maria Louisa sponsored the drinks, others bought small presents. Maria Louisa herself baked a ‘farewell’ cake.
The Bakery in Leiden, Netherlands
In 2018 the Protestant churches in Leiden, the Netherlands, opted to sponsor our Activities Club, after we asked for funds for broadening the experience of the participants with educative outings, and also more support for their carers through coaching mornings followed by lunch outings With this outing to the Zoo we are killing two birds with one stone.
Programme
The outing was also to recognize a change in the staff of the Activities Club. In a brief get-together we say farewell to Maria Louisa and welcome Maria Auxiliadora. After that we send small supervised groups into the Zoo with questions like: ‘How many elephants do you see in the Zoo?, ‘How many animals have cubs?’ designed to focus the attention of everyone. That lasted for about 30 minutes, and everyone received a small prize for having made an effort to answer the questions.
We then went outside to give everyone a chance to beat sweets out of a new design of piñata which were collected by everyone with gusto.
Closing
After that it was my turn to tell the Christmas story in a visual and engaging manner with the help of figures of a nativity set. As always, we ended with some tasty food. This time there were ´enchilladas´ and cake. Finally we invited staff from the Zoo to accept our token gift of appreciation for their part in this afternoon; it was a vase with plastic flowers made by the activities club.
Everyone went home well-satisfied and grateful for a nice event and for everyone who helped to make it happen. Enjoy the pictures of some of the highlights of this event.
