Children’s Festival

A Children’s Festival was held at the Danish Mission School, Tiruvannamalai that invited the participation of school and village children of all faiths from throughout Tiruvannamalai.

Quo Vadis organised two programmes for the Festival held at the School’s Campus on September 8th, 2007. One programme involved forum members of Quo Vadis who have been teaching singing to a group of approximately 75 children and another programme concerned ‘play street theatre’.

In the theatre function 25 children from the Eph-phatha Orphanage (Eph-phatha i.e. ‘open’) schooled in drama by Harmony group, acted out a Theme Child Dream – representing what is in a childs’ imagination.

To learn more about more events of the Children’s Festival at the venue of the Danish Mission School, please read the following news release of September 9th, 2007 issued by the Express News Service.

‘They were allowed to freely doodle on a long white cloth banner using readily available brushes and palettes of colour and were not scolded at for making their hands muddy while designing toys of their fancy using wet clay.

Children were on cloud nine at ‘Buddhangalin Pozhuthu’, a day long congregation of kids here on Saturday.

The informal and fancy-filled event was organized by ‘Cuckoo’ a children’s club at the Danish Mission School campus.

The thousands of visiting children were allowed to spend their time exploring the areas of their interest. While some children chose to gaze at the 2000-odd paintings by students of various schools from across the state, which were displayed under a huge tree, others tried their skills with brushes and colours on the long white screens.

Hundreds of other children thronged to watch acclaimed short films such as ‘Children of Heaven’, ‘Modern Times’, ‘Agni Thoorigai’, ‘Oru Kan Oru Parvai’ and ‘Ayisha’.

Wet clay was freely available to children interested in clay modelling. In the afternoon kids were treated to a puppet show.

An organiser of the event said that the programme was aimed at infusing confidence in the young minds, which the school curriculum will not accomplish.

“Today’s education system treats first rank students as geniuses and low rankers as stupid. This creates a feeling of inferiority in many and superiority in a few. A good education should make the learners brave and liberal . . . Our aim is to make up for the deficiency in the present system of education, by making children confident and liberal thinkers.”’