27 Jul The Main Event

Greetings to all! I hope everyone had a good Latino Conservation Week. The last two weeks have been overrun with me trying to make my Latino Conservation Week event known and have all the materials completed. It was exhausting. I did get to help out with Andrea and Grecia’s event last Sunday, 7/17, at the C&O Canal National Park which was nice. It was interesting to experience other parks and to see how things are run at other locations. As for my event, my original plan involved me having the content printed on real playing cards that are the same material as actual playing cards. I had designed the flyer and image that will be on the back of the cards, the same one that would be used for the banner, which I had done the week prior. But we were not able to actually order the cards until last Monday, 7/18, which meant that the cards would not arrive till this coming week. So we had to improvise. Andrea as kind enough to suggest some alternatives by taking cards and laminating them and then offered to help me make some. I’m very grateful to her efforts. We both made a whole bunch of cards for the scavenger hunt. The way the game worked was that there were 6 locations with 6 different cards that the player had to pick up. On the card was some history of the location and a clue to the next card. When they pick up all 6 cards, the player puts the images on the back of the card together to form a poster that they get to keep.

On Wednesday, 7/20, I went around to many places in Arlington to put up flyers I made for the event. I visited restaurants, Goodwills, community centers, libraries, a Latino food store and a botanica. Many people seemed interested. I don’t know how how many people ended up coming to the event because of the flyers, but we still had a good amount of participation. And a lot of people seemed interested in hearing the story of Carlos. There were some people who I told the story that didn’t participate in the scavenger hunt, but I’m just glad I got to tell his story. Even if it was a short one. I counted about 60 people who participated. The feed back I got was that they did learn something, that they had a good time, and that it made going to Arlington House more enjoyable. My favorite was the little girl, who looked about 6, who really wanted to play even though her mom told her no and then she did it anyway. All in all, I think it went pretty well.