One eventful week :) (20-24th of January)

The week begun with the National day of hugging (21 of January; Tusday) which of course we celebrated in JACis. The day was prepared entirely from the volunteers.
Our original idea was to go out on the streets giving 'Free hugs' to the Rezekne people. Unfortunately the Latvian winter has arrived and it was too cold to carry out this idea outside.

Instead we settled for different kinds of games we can play with the JACis kids inside. All fo them of course involved hugging which was the main idea.

 We  believe that the kids had a lot of fun, so much that in one point they started getting to excited - giving warm hugs to everybody in sight.

 We played "Who can hug the person faster", a variation of hide-and-seek and in the end danced to Makarena (completely unrelated game but still very fun for everybody).
The culmination of all games was a game in which the kids had to find a hidden box full of sweets while constantly hugging each other and searching for clues. In some cases the clues were the volunteers themselfs for which they all received a gigantic group hug.

To end it all we finished with the ultimate Group hug, taught personally by Prokop himself. Can you see everybody on the picture?

But the Hugging day was not the only event we had this week. In Wednesday we were up and ready for yet another celebration, this time orginized completely by JACis: The orange evening.

The evening was thought and leaded by Pilar who is from Spain and knows a thing or two about oranges. Here's what she says about the event - her motication and the outcome of the idea.
 "When Vija told me about preparing the "Orange Party", I was happy because for me was a really great idea! Spain is an important producer of oranges, so I prepared a presentation with information about the orange tree: history,  in what Spanish region are located, curiosities, etc. It was funny to prepare the activities, I was finding information about it and now I know more things about the oranges in my country, for example that there are more than 30.000 orange trees in the Seville centre  :))) .Moreover, we bought oranges and sweets like a presents. Vija and the others volunteers helped to me a lot with the activities and with the translation, thank you very much to Lyudmila specially :D

Children were a little distracted during the presentation, but nevertheless, they got good punctuation in the quiz. And they were active with games that we prepared."

We all sure loved the Orange evening. It inspired us with ideas what we, the other volunteers, can show from our own contries.

The week sure was busy because on Thursday we - the international volunteers along with two local ones (Dima and Tatjana) went to the other youth center in Rezekne - Zeimus  to work with disabled children/ yongsters. It was a memorable day for us because even if a little bit scared at first we soon managed to engaged ourself in playing with them and helping them with the different activities.


But all of that wasn't the end. On top of all On Friday - the end of the week, was the begining of two new activities in JACis.
The first one was lead by Prokop who started a project with the kids of making feedboxes for the birds during the winder in the near park Rajne. He begun the activities by going out in the park with several kids to look for birds during the ocld winter day and trees which branches are good enough to held a feedbox. The kids showed great enthusiasm in counting birds and trees and it could be said that the first part of the project "Let's feed the birds" was successful.





On Friday again  for the first time started the Movie evenings. It was a rather small event but good enough for the first time and gave us, or Lyudmila who was leading it, hope that it can get better and bigger.

The movie that we watched was Billy Eliot - the story of a young lad who wants to do ballet.

It's a storry about prejudices, stereotypes and ultimately about dreams and how you can persue them no matter what. Give it try if you still haven't seen it.