"1st youth festival of arts"

As I was on a tour in Central America with the "Escuela de Comedia y Mimo" until the middle of January we only had about 10 days to organize the camp. Three volunteers went to collect donations of food so that we nearly didn’t need to buy anything.
And so we started on Monday morning, the 26th of January, with 24 kids and 6 volunteers. We took the public bus to reach the Finca Longo Mai, where the camp was to take place. The Finca is a village of refugees from the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
The kids stayed with local families and on Tuesday the instructors from the "Escuela de Comedia y Mimo" should arrive and work with the kids.

But they didn’t and so we made open classes, which means that we juggled, played diabolo, built different toys so that everybody could do something he liked.

Of course we also had a lot of activities apart from circus classes, such as bathing in the river. As the weather was quite hot everybody enjoyed it.

We also had invited a dancer and an actress who offered one- and two-day-classes.

Evelyn with a group of young actors.

Every evening we had presentations of different groups:

Monday: Presentation of the theatre „El Tabanco“: ¿QUE SE CREE ESTE CARAJITO?

Tuesday: After some problems my circus kids showed an excellent performance.

Wednesday: Evelyn’s group presented a short play, the result of two days of intense work.

Thursday: Karla, a dancer from San José, had elaborated a short piece of modern dance with a group of six girls. Afterwards, she showed a wonderful dance performance herself.

Friday: Presentation of the "Escuela de Comedia y Mimo": SUEÑOS (dreams)

Because of some problems with their visas Diego and his group only arrived on Wednesday and started to work with the kids on the next day.

They trained acrobatics, juggling, clowning and all kids participated very well. Together with the Nicaraguan group they created an impressing show. Also the girls were very motivated and elaborated a couple of awesome pyramids.

On Saturday we already left Longo Mai and returned to San Isidro. Quickly we organized some beautiful costumes for the show.

On Saturday evening we had a big presentation on the main stage of the EXPO of Pérez Zeledón and on the following Sunday we could make another show in front of the church.

This was the end of a great week full of good experiences for everyone.