By Cynthia Lu:
Friday, March 29 – Elementary and middle school children came to Chenery Middle School for a night of games, demonstrations, and interactive activities hosted by the BHS UNICEF club. As one of the club’s main fundraisers of the year, it was an event that took weeks of preparation.
UNICEF is a United Nations organization that focusing on helping children around the world gain equal access to basic food, water, safety, and education—all themes that were present in the fact sheet distributed to children as they came in. For each booth they visited, they could collect a stamp for a certain fact, and once they had enough stamps, there were opportunities for raffles and prizes.
At one especially popular booth, you could make your own ice cream with milk, sugar, ice, and a whole lot of shaking. Move on to the next booth and you could learn about water filtration by constructing a plastic bottle filter with layers of gravel, sand, and charcoal, a device used to filter out impurities in water that would otherwise be unfit for drinking. Another booth held a competition for the highest tower built with spaghetti and marshmallows, keeping a running leaderboard of scores.
UNICEF club members ran all of the booths, making sure to blend entertainment—face paint, tattoos, games—with education—teaching children about places without basic clean resources and current human rights crises occurring around the world.
Pizza and home-baked goods were sold as well, and the night was a success thanks to the efforts of the club, as well as the enthusiasm of parents and kids. Family Fun Night 2019 ended up raising $500, all of which will be donated as part of UNICEF’s efforts “for the children,” the slogan displayed on every member’s UNICEF t-shirt or hoodie.
To me, being a part of UNICEF is a chance to feel that I am making a tangible difference for the children around me--a difference I can see in the way their faces light up.
The organization’s values promote not only empathy and support throughout the world, but a genuine sense of happiness and fun that lasts longer than one club meeting, or one night at Chenery.