We leave the schools and communities we visit the richer for our gifts of time and creativity, but also we gift toys, musical instruments, art supplies and sometimes even contribute to supporting materially where we can
After our day show and workshops at Naung Bodeng, a school in a teak forest, a chance to hand over toys and fruit for the children to the head teacher.
After an overnight stay in the church in Mae Klok Ki, we leave toys for the children of the community to play with.
What’s better – giving or getting? We had an amazing day visiting a small community across the Thai Burmese border where we had to ask ourselves the question – who had the most fun? Photo by Vincenzo Florama.
For One Dream One World, a street shelter, we brought fruit trees, donated toys, and enough funds for them to build a new playground and buy a camera to blog with…
The new playground – just add children!!!
For this remote community we gifted a roof for their new herbal medicine clinic, and a watertank to create a herb and vegetable garden.
The herbal medicine clinic was built from local materials, but Spark! paid for the corrugated iron roof.
Any free time? Volunteers tape hoops to donate to schools…
Preparing gift bags to donate. We fill them with creative toys, art supplies and musical instruments…
Hoops being shipped from Bangkok for distribution. In 2013 Spark! spent over $2000 on hoops for workshops and to donate to schools.
The convoy of vehicles about to set out from Mae Sot for a three day trip to visit Nupoe refugee camp carrying all our personal gear, all the circus toys we will donate, our performance gear, fuel, gifts of blankets and bedding, and our 20 volunteers!
Coloboria Birmania, a Spanish NGO we work closely with, asked for musical instruments for one of their schools, and we tested all the local recorders we could find. Thanks to volunteers Lauren and Brent and Marcella Trentacosti who also raised additional funds to buy more musical instruments!
We were very touched by the plight of the children working on the town rubbish dump, and provided all these children with wellington boots before the rainy season via The Best Friend Organisation.
Yay! More giving!
At the end of our tour, Spark!’s old computer was handed over to the dudes at the technical college STTC.
Borderline’s Ma Yi is one of our great contacts in Mae Sot and arranged a visit to a border school, and our workshop for older students at Light School. Here we hand over our music system and miscellaneous goodie bags for distribution in the schools.
Our portable music systems, generously donated by Tracey Northcott and Vinny Walleen via our Indiegogo campaign, was in turn donated to Borderline, a community collective, who will hire it out for events to raise funds.
Besides gifting circus toys, Spark! also donates to material needs when we see how a little cash can make a huge difference. We voted on where we thought our contribution could make the biggest impact.
