Monday, November 17, 2008

Family Fun Day


Saturday the school hosted their second Family Fun Day. One of the goals of the event was to have parents actively engaged in the activity with the children. Apparently here, parents stand around and don’t participate or have the nanny do the activity with the child. The children and parents (many with nannies) were scheduled to come at 7:30 a.m. so the staff was there at 6:00 a.m. We needed to start early since by 9:00 a.m. the sun is brutally hot and most people would be gone. Here I am with two other teachers after we had our faces painted

What impressed me the most was the simplicity of the “games/booths”. They didn’t need all the “whistles and bells” that we have sadly come to expect. No blow-up bouncing rooms, no arcade games, just simple old-fashioned fun. We had hopscotch – which many children didn’t know how to do; along with water relay races, and hockey using a rubber ball and cardboard. At the bubble station the wands were made with a long plastic stick with a pipe-cleaner attached to it to create the bubble wand.

I was working the Piggy Back Race, in which both parents were required to participate. Since many parents also work on Saturday, I was the surrogate parent for many of the participants. We had a lot of fun and lots of giggles.

Vendors had been arranged so there was plenty of food, so I tried different items. They have ice here, which in shape is similar to our freeze pops. But it is much smaller, and consists of coconut milk and different flavors – avocado, melon, and chocolate. The avocado which I had was very sweet with frozen avocado pieces.


After cleaning up a group of us went to a restaurant (really a shack) and had gado-gado. Gado-gado is pure Indonesian cuisine. It is a salad that consists of cooked mixed vegetables and peanut sauce.

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