Hello again from Croatia! This is our second year donating the sets in Zagreb, Croatia, my home city. I have been participating in C4C for forth year now, and my second year as one of the coordinators. First of all I would like to thank Nannan for starting this a few years back. This year was a huge success in my opinion, not only we have raised over 8500 USD, but we even got sponsors – LEGO, Bricklink, and here in Croatia – Prodis llc – LEGO distributor for Croatia and Slovenia. They gave us a 12% discount on the wholesale prices, which allowed us to purchase around $150 worth of sets more.
We bought around 80 sets (still have to sort out the bills), large part of it Duplo as we planned to donate to younger kids this year. My mom and me contributed a bit more and bought meters of wrapping paper and spent a couple of hours packing (picture below).
This allowed me to purchase sets for two causes this year. Most of the sets were donated to home for abandoned children “Dom za djecu Nazorova” in Zagreb. Home accommodates around 50 kids up t age of 7 – when they start elementary school, they are transferred elsewhere. We had a scheduled appointment at 4 PM this Sunday, and besides just leaving the sets in the home, I joined with volunteers (picture below) from Dora (largest children’s humanitarian organization in Croatia). Together we spent whole 3 hours playing with kids, and helping them assemble their LEGO sets. Kids were thrilled with the gifts, and enjoyed their time playing with us. It was a heartwarming and pleasant afternoon, though I couldn’t help but feel a bit sad for the kids. They are all so communicative, and can’t wait to have someone to talk to, or to sit in someone’s lap, even if it’s just someone they just met. They have pretty good care in the home, but of course it still isn’t the same as having parents so they still lack some contact and human warmth. This was also the first time someone donated such a large amount of high quality toys – usually they get used toys, and almost never LEGO, as it’s considered somewhat of a luxury here because recession hit really hard in Croatia.
Yesterday morning we went to Dora Humanitarian Organization and met there with a couple of poor families with lots of kids (some have even 17 :/). Altogether there were only 9 kids, so we got them each a gift, and the rest of the sets we donated to Dora to distribute among some other families who couldn’t be there in this busy pre-Christmas period.