Christmas for 100 children with special needs

The work with the parents of the children and adolescents with special needs has resulted in a wonderful Christmas celebration end December 2024. This time the organization of the party was almost 100 % in the hands of the parents. They organized the program, the place of celebration, the gifts, the snacks and drinks.

In former years FCID would organize all of this, but it was a pleasure to see the parents take over this task, albeit with your financial support and some logistics support from FCID.

As usual a large part of the program was the Christmas drama performed by the young people of the 4 adolescent groups. A rehearsal was done a week before and although some of them did not show up during the Christmas celebration, the young persons who had to step in and had not been at the rehearsal did surprisingly a great job!! Also one of the group participants with Down Syndrome performed a traditional Dominican dance with her dance partner who she had invited for this celebration. One of the other young persons with special needs gave a great demonstration of his dancing skills in the style of Michael Jackson.

After a long time of inactivity because of the vacation period, the parents had a first meeting in February with the theme of the ABC of Mental Health. The turn out was not great, but the interaction was great and it was decided to make sure the majority of the parents would profit from this message as those present realized it might even improve many of the family situations! The idea of organizing smaller group meetings in the different communities was brought forward in order to make it easier for the parents to attend the meetings.

We would like to extend our thanks to the support you gave to this celebration and the support of the parents to become more organized and start to take actions to make sure the needs of their children will be supplied by the government or any other necessary services.