Community sports day

It took us a little bit of time to work out the bureaucracy and clearance processes we needed to go through in order to organise a community event, but we eventually worked it out and scheduled two in for weeks 7 and 9.

Our first community event had the aim of bringing the community together. One of the things we had identified in our initial survey at the start of our placement was that a number of the beneficiaries didn’t know each other and the majority didn’t work together in farming their plots. We hoped that a fun community event would bring everyone together and get them talking.

Our community liaison team worked really hard to plan and organise a community sports day which we were going to hold on a flat bit of ground just outside the boundary of Kentucky farm. Unfortunately before we could run the sports day we had to clear this flat piece of ground. It was a bit of a hard slog for the volunteers but with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm they managed to clear the ground and roughly mark out our race track for the day.

The community liaison team had identified that they wanted to have a cultural exchange as part of the day and so they wanted to have a British picnic. As we were lacking in scones, cream and jam they opted for pasta salad and egg sandwiches. We were aiming to have all 216 beneficiaries attending and so we had to cook enough for everyone. This proved to be slightly challenging when we only had 2 saucepans and 2 hobs! But we eventually managed to get the pasta and the eggs boiled and thousands of sandwiches made.

We ran races for the beneficiaries including sack races, sprint, three legged race and the tug of war. It was great fun, and all the beneficiaries were smiling throughout the day. They even seemed to enjoy our “British picnic”! All in all a very successful day.