Cienaga, December 27, 2022
With the goal of promoting sports and encouraging children to use their free time to sharpen their talents and skills in a way that is healthy, responsible, and sustainable, Drummond Ltd. concluded another year with the Sports Training and Introduction Center, CIFD for the Spanish, at the rural school Carlos Garcia Mayorca in Cienaga. Working with Fundeban and the Casa en el Arbol Foundation, the program provides training in five disciplines: basketball, soccer, volleyball, track and field, and chess.
Simultaneously, the program continued to work toward closer-knit families through the Parents’ School. This school provides seminars on topics, such as how to deal with events that can affect family function or unity, to strengthen family relations at home.
At the event to close out the year 2022, the participating youth played different sports and displayed the fruits and vegetables they have harvested from their home gardens. Planting home vegetable gardens was one of the project’s main activities when it had to adapt to an online mode during the COVID-19 pandemic, but has continued to be one of the flagship activities after going back to an in-person format, due to the benefits it has produced.
It has been so popular that, in the year 2022, the project organized a Farming Fair, where the youth demonstrated what they have learned from planting their gardens. This activity has increased participants’ awareness about where food comes from and the importance of preventing waste, and has also impacted the food security of the participating families.
According to Maria Fernanda Barbosa, psychologist in charge of counseling for the CIFD project, “The project has had a very positive and very large impact on the community of Cordobita, because we are giving children, teenagers, and parents skills for life, skills for working as a team, skills for solving conflicts, and skills for better communication, with the respect for ideas and tolerance that we should have. We are giving them skills in sports through coaching for soccer, basketball, volleyball, and chess, among the different disciplines at CIFD.”
The top three academic performers were also recognized during the closing event, and were given a bicycle to encourage them to keep working hard toward a comprehensive education, together with their classmates.
With the conclusion of CIFD’s activities for the year 2022, Drummond Ltd. and its partners have reinforced their relationship with the communities and have helped build skills that will make a contribution to their future.