Sunday 23 June 2013

Water, wind, rain and lollipops

Last weekend was our first official event in the UK. Unfortunately, it's not as impressive as it sounds. Our first event was in fact a school fete held in Rayleigh, Essex. We had agreed to run a stall at the fete to spread awareness about Dravet Syndrome, but also to try and raise some money for the cause. We came up with several different ideas for our stall to try and attract people to come over and have a go, but we eventually decided on using water pistols to shoot at plastic bottles. We also decided to have a back up and have a roll a 2p game as well.

We bought the water pistols from a local shop for a cheap price the day before and started to test them out on the morning before the fete. Annoyingly, they were not quite as good as we had hoped they would be, not managing to be powerful enough to knock over the bottles, even though the wind seemed to be very good at doing that! We then had a further set back when Carmen (who was testing it at the time) broke one of the water pistols by pumping it too vigorously. This was to be a bit of a problem considering we were going to be asking kids to do this and they were even more likely to break them. So we decided in the end to use sponges instead of water pistols to knock over the bottles.

Later on the same day we arrived at the fete with all our equipment and we headed over to start setting it up. We had three little tables all to ourselves so we were quite pleased that we had plenty of space to promote our cause! On one table we placed some hand knitted hats, bracelets and brooches made by Carmen's mum, on another we placed our roll a 2p game and on the third we had an example of some of the prizes that people could win (books, puzzles and lollipops!) We also placed a big board advertising what our stall was all about. Once we had set everything up we were ready to go.

Proud stall owners cowering under some trees

Unfortunately for us, last weekend was not a very good weekend to hold a fete due to some rather adverse weather conditions. There was quite a downpour of rain for the first hour of the fete, with quite heavy winds throughout the whole thing. This impacted a fair bit on the amount of people who stayed at the fete and wandered round taking part in the activities. It also caused us to have remove most of the stuff from the tables to stop it getting too wet or blown off (as you can see above). But we were lucky enough, even though we ended up being stuck under some trees to protect us from the rain, to make £10.18.

Carmen demonstrating how to miss all the bottles



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