With Christmas right around the corner, the Rotaract Club of General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University stepped up once again to fulfill the true meaning of the season of giving. ‘Sleigh of Joy’ is a community service project initiated by the club back in 2019 to spread love and joy to less fortunate children during the festive season.
For the 4th consecutive year, the project was conducted at the Tudawe Child Development Centre in Wadduwa on the 22nd of December 2022, under the project co-chairpersons Rtr. Sidrah Yooseph and Rtr. Lakshitha Jayasinghe. Thirteen club members gathered at the center to help distribute groceries and gifts while ensuring that all the children enjoyed a memorable day filled with music and dance.
The organizing committee collected donations of essential groceries by conducting social media campaigns from the 2nd to the 21st of December. The contributions were used to provide the center with vegetables, spices, milk powder, rice, sugar, dhal, soya, sprats, soap, and washing powder. The remaining monetary contributions were used to provide the 27 girls present at the center with gifts, treats, and an evening snack.
To make the project more festively memorable, the members sang Christmas carols and other popular songs with the children. In contrast, they made the event livelier with two beautifully choreographed dances. The entertaining games conducted invoked laughter and exciting chatter from the children: they played ‘pass the present,’ where the one who ended up with the gift had to sing or dance; the ‘memorization game,’ where ten different items were displayed on a table and the children had to write down the items from memory; and finally, the game ‘hot and cold.’
The highlight of the event was when the members were enticed with pure joy on the faces of the children as they danced and sang along to their favorite songs. The project came to an end at around 5:30 pm with the distribution of snacks and drinks, and we Rotaractors left them with some motivational words for their future endeavors.
The success of the project was written on the faces of the smiling children as we bid goodbye to the innocent souls at the Tudawe Child Development Centre, reminding us that Christmas is not just about Santa and Christmas trees.
Penned by
Rtr. Sidrah Yooseph
Rotaract Club of General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University
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