Open Day at CICD

Students and teachers decided to organise an Open Day at CICD in order for people to know get to know what exactly we do at our school. It’s very important for all of us to have this contact with the communities surrounding us.

Students and teachers decided to organise an Open Day at CICD in order for people to know get to know what exactly we do at our school. It’s very important for all of us to have this contact with the communities surrounding us.

This event was very special because my team and I start our “DI course” (Development Instructor course) 2 weeks ago, so it was the first time that we were responsible to organise this kind of event and prepare a lot of activities and invite people. It was a good opportunity to test our capacity to work together and co-operate in the team.

The programme for the day included theatre, exhibitions, games, a movie about our daily life and food and drinks.

The starting point of this Open Day was the theatre play, performed by our friends from the March Team. It was also a good opportunity for DI-s who just arrived back from Africa and India to make exhibitions about the projects where they had been working. They decorated the dining hall with pictures and stuff that they brought back from India and Africa, mainly from Angola, Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa.  They were also available to give more explanations about the projects and their experiences in the local reality.

We also prepared some games, such as “Twister” that we made by painting a blanket, and Ura from Japan prepared some activities for kids.

We were very glad and surprised, because we didn’t expect so many people - but when we were finishing our lunch, the cars of the first guests already arrived! The time passed very quickly. 

We served drinks and food that we had prepared. Ernestine (a Cameroonian girl in my team) made lemonade and a delicious mango juice; she also prepared a typical snack from her country: sweet peanuts and chin- chin. Odilia had baked an apple cake and Eric a banana cake. Our guests were very curious to taste our specialities because they were very original and a good way to share our different cultures with them. They were very surprised and they liked it very much!

At 3 pm the theatre started. The March team quite nervous about this,but the performance went very well. Guests, students and teachers all enjoyed the piece and afterwards everybody was ready to eat the pizza that we had prepared. Luis who was in charge of the pizza, has had a pizzeria before in Portugal - so you can easily imagine that the pizzas were very very good! We ate more than the stomach could tolerate!

The atmosphere of the Open Day was very friendly. We spoke with our guests about our countries, our experiences in England and our  activities here at CICD. It was a perfect day to hold this Open Day, as we were very lucky to have sun all the time. The kids could enjoy the different games and the adults took time to discuss outside, to see the exhibitions and presentations from the projects, and to watch the video that we made about our live in CICD.

The day went even better than we had expected! Our guests left very happy with their day and we felt very proud about what we organised.

It was a good training for our future work in Africa and India, and a good way to start our DI course.