Children's Day Carnival

My church held a community service yesterday. It was an event dedicated for the children's day, hence the church made a children's carnival day for the kids in Geylang area. Oh yeah, for those of you who don't know, my church is in Geylang area. Nice area for a church eh?

The Indonesian ministry was asked to fill in a game stall in the event, and it was me and Hezron who were asked to coordinate the games. We were confused on what games to do as both of us was not the type of guy who like to play this kind of games (we tend to disappear from outing games). Luckily, Ibu Dina was kind enough to gave us an idea on what we could make for the event: Fishing Game.

We went on with the idea, named the stall 'Fishermen's Friend' and to out surprise, it went quite well. In fact, the children seems to come endlessly to the stall (well, it was quite a crowd) and it was a really tiring evening.

The original plan was to use styrofoam cut as fishes, paint them using pylox and put hooks in their mouth. Turns out, it was a BAD AND STUPID IDEA. Cutting fishes out of a styrofoam was cumbersome, and the pylox would destroy and corrupt the styrofoam, literally. I never knew about this before --'. So, with only a few days left before the event we need a change of plans. We improvised and change the fishes from styrofoam into..

..Cans of soft drinks. Genius. LOL.

We take out all the cans from the church's recycle bin, select the usable ones, clean them and use them as 'fishes'. Please don't ask us how gross it was when we actually clean those cans. It was not a pretty sight. To make things worse, there seems to be someone who throw his lunch into the recycle bin for the cans. I leave that into your imagination.

Ah.. Things we do to cut costs for a community service.

The problem is, the cans must be filled with water to make the mouthpiece hookable, otherwise the cans will nungging and the mouthpiece will face down. But to make it so will make the 'fish' very HEAVY for children. We was afraid that the rod/string will break so we help them take the cans directly after they are able to lift it from the water surface a little bit.

Overall, it was a very interesting day. There were some naughty children who cheat a lot, putting the hook to the cans using their hand (might as well take out the cans themselves.. duh..). There was a kid who felt frustrated since he can't get 5 cans in three minutes and made a fuss with other children. There was a parent who protests to us that the game was too hard (while other kids seems to hit 10 cans in 5 minutes).

There was a kid who cut the line, came from my back and talk to me. He told me about his experience with fishing, how we could make the game more interesting, and even told me that he like a certain girl that was playing at that time. I could only smile and feel SWT! Children these days --'. I lost count of how many times I said "The game will be played for three minutes. Please try to get 5 or more cans in that three minutes. Those who are able to do so, please approach that uncle or that sister for a gift stamp. 5 cans in three minutes. Please don't touch the string. The game will start in 3.. 2.. 1.. GO!"

This experience made me appreciate the teacher of Sunday School more.. Really.. Haha.. Doing that for four hours straight with only 5 hours of sleeping time the night before was really tiring.. But it was cool =D. Special thanks to Anthony (a.k.a. that Uncle) and Nesha (a.k.a. that Sister) for helping us. Arigato Gozaimasu.