Comunidade Vida e Paz

This activity was perhaps one of my favorites so far since it was the first CAS activity, I had ever done, in service to the homeless, I have to say that at the time was both nervous and excited since I didn't know exactly what I would do, but in the end it went very well I think.

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        The location of this activity was at one of the mess halls of the local university, however it was organized by the known solidarity institution "Comunidade Vida e Paz". This organization was created in 1989 with the sole purpose of helping Lisbon's homeless through a series of initiatives such as: food distribution; clothing; training programs, among others. but the most spectacular is the annual Christmas diner, which is help every year in the weekend of 16th to 18th December, the purpose of this gathering is to make people feel that theyr need to change their (since some homeless people are in that situation by choice, or because they have given up on themselves), and by the combination of  a nice, free, meal and some lovely entertainment, hopefully they will be convinced to change their lives and move to the top floor of the building were professionals are ready to help them start this new journey. 

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When this proposal was presented at our school me and 2 other friends decided to give them a hand with their event, and so on December 17th, just after lunch we went to the mess hall. When we got there we saw a huge line of people waiting to come in and from that moment we realized that this activity was going to be hard, nevertheless we entered the building and when we got there we had some people waiting for us which quickly gave us our staff shirts and sent us to our "work" area, at the time is was a little bit confusing since there were a lot of people passing trough the halls and we didn't know exactly were to go, but we found our way to the animation stop were some members were already practicing. during the whole night we cheered u the people, and was very satisfying to see so many people laughing and dancing and a few did go to the top floor to receive help (which made this activity worthwhile).

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On the second day at the beginning things went much smoother in the beginning since we knew what to do, however, as the night progressed some things did not went very well. this all started when we, the animators, realized that since people were having diner we could stop "animating" for a bit and perhaps take a break, however,  people we needed to help at the tables since on that day ore people had shown up, personally we didn't mind to work on the tables we were there because we wanted to help, however many people were complaining about the service of the "waiters" (us) because some people were already eating desert while others haven't had their soup yet, they didn't realize that there was a lot of people there (as we can see in picture 2) and that we couldn't serve everyone at the same time, also many people were being rude to the waiters, were they "demanded" more food despite already having eaten, the reason why this was so sad was because the people didnt understood the effort we were putting into making that night a success and were just worried about themselves and their own problems without even thinking of the work we were having.

Nevertheless the rest of the night went very well with the live performance of some famous singers such as Rui Veloso and Marco Paulo. 

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