Interact OVC Party

Serving cocoa to the kids 

The gorilla one of the children drew at the Drawing Station

Teaching one of the kids how to write CAR

Walking Vivian back to the parking lot

Today we held the Interact OVC Christmas party. Unfortunately it was raining, so we couldn't go play in the playground or go swimming, especially since most of the children are HIV positive. So we altered our plans and divided the party up into 4 stations: the breakfast station, clothes & books, reading room, movie, and coloring. I was a group leader, so I took one group of children to each station. We began at breakfast where we made cocoa and served mendazis, hard boiled eggs, sausages and so on to the children for breakfast. Then we went to clothes/books and helped children pick four articles of clothing and two books. There it was quite hectic because some children didn't know what to do and some took too many things. There was one girl, called Vivian, who was shivering because she was cold from the rain and she wasn't sure how to pick out clothes so Rosa and I helped her pick her clothes. The next room, the reading room, was also hectic but A LOT of fun. We got to help the children read and I love reading to kids so I got really into it. Every time we came across a word I thought I could make a connection to I tried to teach the children it. I was able to teach Vivian how to count up to five on her fingers and I taught the children at my table how to differentiate between various colors. Particularly the color red because that was written in one of their books. In this room I found that the older kids seemed as if they were trying to get more clothes through the younger kids. They kept going through the younger children's bags and the younger children couldn't say anything. Not only were they too young to understand, but as their elders the older kids probably intimidated them. Also I feel like the language barrier contributed to this too. I'm planning on telling Ms. Henderson or Parijat on Monday so that this issue can be addressed. We went to the coloring room in the end where we had a lot of interaction with the children, as we saw what they were drawing, helped them think of things to draw and so on. There was one kid who was drawing a gorilla from one of the books he'd picked up and it was excellent! I was really impressed and I'm excited for the next OVC party we have!