At the beginning of December the beautiful time of Christmas starts and also at SETU Nepal, we want to incorporate the magic of this festival into our activities. Besides decorating a Christmas tree and spending precious and valuable time together on Christmas Day, this year brought a new exciting project. The children of SETU Nepal received the great opportunity of making New year’s cards, which will be send to our donor organization ONGD-FNEL, which is located in Luxembourg. Making 200 cards is a big task, so we made sure to start early and bring a lot of variety into the making of the New year’s wishes. By using different materials such as coloured pencils, crayons and markers, the children could be as creative as they wanted, the only condition was that their drawings should be Christmas related. Christmas trees, snowmen, reindeers, stars and snowflakes covered all of the cards in the end and it was great to see how the children brought a unique twist to their creations. If they wanted to make a pink snowman, they were absolutely allowed to, the idea was to give them a general image of what to draw and let them interpret the rest according to their own wishes. This showed them that they can express their feelings, thoughts and ideas freely, which we highly encourage. During the whole activity the children were so happy, motivated and always curious finding new details, that they could add to their drawings. It was a great experience for us to see, just how much talent and creativity they have and it was also interesting for them to learn a little bit more about Christmas, the traditions and decorations. However, the funniest part for the children apparently wasn’t the colouring itself, but writing their name on each of their drawings. Like artists they signed their masterpieces and couldn’t have been more proud.
After the colouring the real work started. Cutting the drawings and cardstock to size, pasting them together, adding Nepalese paper in the inside of the cards and finally embellishing every card with colourful tape, was a precise process. However, milk tea, different snacks and good conversations made us really enjoy this festive activity and put us in a real Christmas spirit. Every member of the SETU Nepal team gave a helping hand and at the end our effort really paid off and everybody was so proud of the handmade cards.
We hope that they will bring as much joy to ONGD-FNEL and their donors as they brought to us. It has been a rewarding bonding experience for the children and the volunteers, as they created the cards together and as such grew closer. Furthermore, we noticed that it has been a good way for fundraising, as we will not only make benefits, that will be fully used for the education of children but our handicrafts will also bring happiness to other people and at the same time promote our work. We are very grateful for this opportunity and the outcome and we want to thank our children and our entire team for their creativity, motivation and effort. It would be great if in the future, we could continue this idea and start an initiative, in which we would involve the mothers or former beneficiaries in handy crafting. The made products could be sold and the benefits made, would support SETU Nepal’s activities, such as child education, health treatments and trainings. We hope everybody had a good start into 2019 and we wish a happy and joyful new year !
