This is my third year of participating in Creations for Charity, but my first year of being one of the coordinators. This way, we went international, including Croatia and Chile in the donations. I live in Zagreb, Croatia, and me and Nannan decided to make our donations to a small orphanage on outskirts of Zagreb. It is a home to 33 elementary school children. Here, we don’t have a national program as Toys for Tots in the USA, so I made the delivery by myself. I bought the sets from our local LEGO distributor, and they also offered a small discount when they heard that it’s for Christmas donations (thank you Prodis LLC). I’ve decided to buy each kid a personal gift, rather than donating the bricks to the institution. It’s Christmas after all. I got City and Dino sets for boys, and Friends sets for girls. We mixed as many different sets we could, so they could get different gifts, and later play together, or exchange between themselves if they liked something else better. For the remaining amount we bought a couple of LEGO board games and one Mindstorms NXT 2 set for their computer workshop. There are after all, kids up to age 14 in the home, so we thought that would be an ideal gift for their age group. I arrived there on 20th December. It was a beautiful and touching moment. They already had their Christmas three set up in the lobby, and we laid down all of the presents beneath it. When kids arrived back from school, I gave each one their gift. It was rare for them to get something really for themselves, and they were really happy. Once they unwrapped the gifts and seen that it were LEGO, they were even more thrilled. I think this was the first time for most of them to play with LEGO bricks. I stayed a while, and helped the younger ones built their models, and then left with a huge grin on my face.
Thank you all for participating in this noble cause, and congrats to Nannan for his organizational skills and for this beautiful idea. I hope to continue to contribute in the years that follow.