As you may have read on the About Us page of our website, we plan to organise events on a regular basis in order to raise awareness of the values we wish to promote in our activity, but also in our daily life.
In addition to our main activity, importing and exporting natural and organic products from Paraguay, we decided to give ourselves half a day a week to work on this project (and also on our free time in the evenings and weekends!).
We are happy to announce that we have organised and held our first event on Saturday 26 February 2022 in our commune of Souppes-sur-Loing!
1) Chosing the event
We had initially decided on an event focused on environmental preservation: a clean-up of the town.
After having well written our file, we went to meet the mayor on Wednesday 19 January 2022 to tell him about our wish to organise these various events, starting with a waste collection on Saturday 26 February. He put us in touch with the city's environment department, who told us that a clean-up was already being organised for the beginning of spring and that the best thing would be for us to join them in this event.
Our first idea
We were very happy to have been able to get in touch with the elected representative for the environment, Mrs BAUDON, who gave us all her support in our project.
We now had to come up with a new idea, as we really wanted to hold our first event on 26 February!
We quickly got our brains working, and noted a few ideas:
19 January, in our road book
The idea was refined over time, and 10 days later, on 29 January, we were sure:
Our first event will be a giant treasure hunt through the city!
2) Defining the routes
In order to respect the themes of our project, we carefully choose the stages of our route:
essential establishments of the town that are part of the history of our country (town hall, schools, media library, health centre, etc.)
points that refer to the environment (rubbish bins, drinking water fountains, riverside, etc.)
places that call for solidarity (local shopkeepers, Secours Populaire, social centre, war memorial, etc.)
We prepare 3 different routes:
3) Preparing the riddles
In order to determine the next step of the course, you have to solve a riddle. We decide to diversify the riddles as much as possible to make the game fun! As we have a lot of participants, we decide to make the course for some in one direction, and for the others in the other direction. That makes 6 routes to complete!
An overview of the routes and different puzzles to go from stage to stage
4) Partners and helpers
In order to help us organise this first event, the town hall put us in contact with the town's social centre, La Passerelle, which gave us several ideas and advice, as well as help (for shopping for the end-of-event snack, for preparing the coffee, etc.). The town hall provided us with equipment to set up on site (tables, chairs, marquees for shelter) and financed the snack.
The girls of the Social Centre
The wonderful communication that Patrick BRUNET made for our event,
in charge of communication at the town hall
We also had the help of several volunteers who helped us to install and uninstall the equipment, as well as to serve the snacks while we, the organisers, were busy accompanying the participants to the end of their routes,
were busy accompanying the participants to the end of their routes.
Volunteers serving snacks
Dismantling of the marquees
Also, several shopkeepers agreed to keep the envelopes for distribution to the participants during their rounds, as well as to participate in the rewards for the winners!
To the Brocante Au chat qui Chine, who gave us cups and gift vouchers
All the gifts from the shopkeepers for the awards!
5) Preparing of all our tracks
A long work of cutting, folding, "wrapping", which took us a nice evening... and the beginning of the night! (end after 03:30 AM)
Logistics, with the help of parents
6) The deposit of tracks on the courses
On the road from 8:30 am to drop off the tracks on 22 stages of the courses
7) The game!
More than 110 participants came to join us on Saturday 26 February at 2.30pm on the Place de la République!
For a summary of the game we let you watch the video we made for the occasion:
Click on the image above to access the video
Don't hesitate to subscribe if you haven't already done so, and don't hesitate to like and comment on this video. It is your advice and criticism that will allow us to improve every day in this project!
A big thank you to the participants for their opinions, and their photos/videos that allowed us to make this video!
8) An article about the event in the newspaper
To finish in beauty, we let you read the beautiful article written by Laredj DJEBAR in the Eclaireur du Gâtinais, a weekly newspaper of local and regional information distributed in the Loiret and Seine-et-Marne departments. Many thanks to him!
Article by Laredj DJEBAR, L'Eclaireur du Gâtinais