Drawing competition

A few weeks ago we wrote that we were going to organise a painting contest for the children in the neighbourhood. The winners would then paint their winning design on the walls of our workshop. This way we would get some goodwill, a painted workshop and some more publicity, if only locally.

Mid June Loes visited the teachers of the primary schools in Malena and Palo Seco to organise the contest. Shortly afterwards she spoke to the teachers from the primary school in Torio, who also wanted to join. Partly because ‘tourism’ is now part of the primary school curriculum and they were looking for an excursion. All children from age 10 to 12 could participate, that amounted to 43 participants.

Loes first organised a tour of our reforestation project for the children. She showed them the bats, the stream with the prawns, the rancho’s, young trees and some were lucky enough to see ‘our’ barn owl fly off (we have a breeding pair). But twenty children are hardly inconspicuous, so most wildlife had discreetly retired while the children roamed our project. At the end of the tour they received paper for their drawing/painting and some information about the theme. The theme was, of course, nature/ecology. You can’t indoctrinate, sorry, inform, children early enough.

On 27 juni Rob visited the schools to pick up the paintings and drawings. Some of those can be seen on the photo site www.flickr.com/photos/tanagertourism. We were delighted with the angry owl of Milagro del Carmen uit Torio (12 yr) who wrote on the back that the owl was angry because people were cutting down the trees in which it lives. We also liked the drawing of Milagres from Palmilla (11 jr) who was the only one to add a few farm animals. From Torio we received two real paintings, painted on the bags in which rice is transported and framed. Lots of paintings showed butterflies, lizards and caymans and a few showed very nice drawings of the Panama tree. We noted that children from Palo Seco all worked with pencils. According to the teacher, the parents in Palo seco could not afford paint or colour pencils.

Since there were so many beautiful drawings and paintings we decided to give everybody a sketch book and pencils. We looked for original drawings (some children had traced a picture and coloured it in, which was not what we wanted), style and design. The winners, among them Milagres and Milagro del Carmen, could choose an additional prize.

On 2 juli we awarded the prizes and all children were invited to visit us again. We had already painted a landscape on the wall and the winners could add lizards, trees, birds, butterflies etc. Kees was also present (it takes a while to get a visa for Angola, so he came back for two weeks). Holly, the Peace Corps volunteer from Malena was also helping us. The children who did not win a prize could help plant a tree if they wanted, which they did.

The photos on the website show the final result of this common effort.