Since Wednesday, 6th July we were present in Lubiąż near Wrocław on the SlotArt Festival. Thank you to the organizers for the invitation.
It’s the Foundation’s first encounter with this kind of event lasting several days: thousands of people, workshops – manual, artistic and musical, concerts, adults and children… we are incredibly impressed.
The battle with the tent – in the wind during a short storm – ended with victory thanks to the help of the boys from the School of Physical Education, which allowed us to set up our workshop in the gardens, where non-governmental organizations appear each year.
For the next 3 days we were meeting the other participants and preparing educational sheets for schools in Africa, we talked about helping, voluntary service, education in Africa, aid programmes :) In the so-called meantime we were handed out “free hugs” and spoke to our neighbours from the Polish Humanitarian Action, The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity and NeoLazarus from Poznań. 25 organizations appeared on the Festival altogether!
In the following days the number of people at the stand definitely increased, so besides benches, we used our part of the floor to place a picnic blanket.
Together we made beautiful maps, language sheets, word conjugation, numerous internal and external organs with detailed descriptions, and a wonderful team of Volunteers from Spain, Turkey and a few other countries spent basically the whole afternoon with us (Yosuf and Friends thank you!!!). They even created a musical guy and a whole stave with notes – for music-loving kids :)
We wrote ourselves onto the wall of dreams, watched a game of the Polish Humanitarian Action “A Well in Sudan”, visited workshops about sign language and children’s emotions, and after an intense day we listened to the concert of the day from the windows of Cafe Cynamon: Bovska and Mesajah.
During the last day, it was both rainy and sunny, as proven by a rainbow – and a double one at that. New, very talented faces appeared on the stand who created incredible internal organs. We used encyclopaedias, children’s books, other organizations’ advice and our own imagination and knowledge. We want the sheets that have been made to be duplicated into many copies, and once finished, to add descriptions on them in different languages and laminate them – and so delivered to our friends in schools in Kenya, Tanzania, Nepal or Cameroon.
Our work in the foundation is primary done from a distance – so it was even more pleasant to meet many people face to face and laugh together, eating Tanzanian chipati with beans, served everyday by Asia and Magda, who accompanied Agnieszka on the festival. There was no shortage of volunteers for delicious treats, working on the sheets and chatting.
We’re definitely coming back next year! See you there!
If you too would like to take your girlfriend, family with children, friends or grandmother to a fun event and spend time differently than every day – you can come too!
Link to the festival’s site: http://slot.art.pl/pl/
Programme of the 2016 edition on the organizer’s site in PDF: http://slot.art.pl/pl/program
GALLERY – more pictures below:
