Asia Shaped Souls

4 year old children from a kindergarten in Bucharest have donated for Asia. They bagged their parents to give them money for the Asians from who the "water took their toys and houses".

Adi, a 4 year old kid puts his forefinger in the blue colored paste. With his dirty little finger he draws the water on the sheet of paper: high curves of blue paste signifying the waves reach the top of the sheet and, in the right, a big blue blot looking like a vortex. His colleague, Beti, draws the water in black. It is muddy and ugly. This is the description of two of the drawings in the B middle group from the Kindergarten no. 38. The teacher has told them about the unhappy people in Asia, from whom the water took everything.

CHILD HEART "The water came and took their toys", Victor (4) seriously explains. He cannot remember his age, but his parents taught him to raise his right hand with his thumb bent. Teacher Daniela Tudor Vasilescu gave lessons about water for an entire week. This is how Asia was brought into discussion. At a certain time, the TV in the classroom was turned on and the kids saw the little children in Indonesia planting palm trees. After that, there was some news with many people. The teacher told them they were grownups that gathered there from all over the world to help the ones hit by the water. Daniela Vasilescu put a glass jar on her desk and said that who ever wanted was allowed to put money from "their own money boxes" in the jar in order to help the children in Asia. This is how 480,000 lei were collected.

WITH THE CHILDREN TO THE POST OFFICE "I didn’t ask for money from the parents, but I would have collected a large sum if I had done that. This way they used their own savings or asked for money from the parents", Vasilescu tells us. From the 23 kids of the B middle group, 15 have brought money. Some brought 10,000, others brought 50,000, all accordingly to the sums their parents gave them. At the end of the week, the teacher collected all the money and went to the post office with the kids. She put the money into the banking account UNICEF opened.

"In Asia, the water came and took everything from them. There was an earthquake under the sea", a little girl looking like a little rabbit explains. "Is the water always bad?", The teacher intervenes. "Not always", she answers. "Can we live without water?" "Nooo!", the chorus of the little children gathered around a little table with drawings on it answers. "But why can’t we live without it?" "Because we die", a miffed kid answers. Ana Maria, 4 and a half, says she didn’t want to buy chocolate with the money her parents gave to her. "I felt pity for them!"

CONVINCING "She came home and started to jump around saying: >", Ana Maria’s mother tells us. The teacher thought that the gesture of the children "was wonderful", and, for this reason, she gave them diplomas having written on them: "Awarded to the pupil for excellent results at the > activity".

Some of these children cannot even pronounce correctly the name of the Asian tragedy: "tsunami". In the souls of the 4 year old children, the kindness feeling appeared before the indifference feeling.