Sesame Street comes to town
MORE than 600 children yesterday ‘hokey-pokeyed, itsy bitsy spidered’ and clapped their hands and stamped their feet to the instruction of Sesame Street characters in the Central Kingston community of Southside.
The occasion was the annual children’s treat at Bethlehem Home put on by Missionaries of the Poor, with the assistance of the Beaches Negril team, which brought the Sesame Street characters Cookie Monster, Grover, Zoe, Elmo, Bert, Ernie to the inner city.
When ATL Group Director of Children’s Programmes, Laura Chandley, said the children would go “ballistic” when they saw the characters, she knew what she was talking about.
The children jumped, screamed and ignored repeated pleas to sit down after the characters got on stage to sing and dance for them. Getting off the stage was harder than getting on, for the furry life-size monsters had to squeeze their way through a throng of children.
“As long as they want us to come back [next year], we will,” Chandley said in response to the enthusiastic reaction of the children.
Since 2004, the Beaches chain of hotels, which comprises three properties in Jamaica and extends to the Turks and Caicos Islands north of Jamaica, has partnered with Sesame Street and has been using the characters in its ongoing outreach activities.
As part of the programme, each Beaches hotel takes Elmo and his friends out to neighbouring basic and primary schools, hospitals, infirmaries and children’s homes twice per month, all with the same objective: to bring laughter, cheer and educational activities to children, especially those in unfortunate situations.
In an earlier interview with the Observer, a Kids Camp Manager at Beaches Boscobel explained that the Sesame Street programme served to create an awareness in the children themselves, by exposing them to things outside of the regular school curriculum.
“Sesame Workshop is about community development and that is in keeping with our (Beaches) mandate to give back to the community, which is why we try to expose the children to Sesame Street…and to tourism,” the hotel’s public relations manager, Denise Treasure, said.
