Dinosaur Day at Bayview Mission

On June 26, 2010, Bayview Mission held its first annual Dinosaur Day. Monday, July 26, while she was volunteering at the food pantry, I interviewed Victoria Holt to tell us more about the event:


So what exactly IS Dinosaur Day at Bayview Mission?

Dinosaur Day is a fun day that we had on a Saturday earlier this summer and want to start having every year. The kids can come and hang out, and basically everything at Bayview Mission is Dinosaur themed. So we have dinosaur games all over the tables and dinosaur coloring books and dinosaur reading books, and dinosaur everything! There were bones buried in the garden for them to find. All sorts of fun stuff!

What was the age range of kids who attended Dinosaur Day?

For these kinds of events, it’s usually 5 to about as old as 12 to 13. We had a couple kids who were a bit older, but they were still getting involved and having fun.


What was your role in the event?

I was in a young adult counselor role. I read dinosaur books to the children as they sat around in the Zen garden. Just for fun, with the bones, I went out in Reverend Nina’s bee suit that she uses for tending her beehives in her yard, and dug up a bone wrapped in burlap. I came up to the children and acted like I’d found this great discovery. We unwrapped it, and when they saw it was a “dinosaur bone”, they all went wild! So, I mainly helped to get them excited about what we were doing.

Talk about some of the experiences you saw in terms of kids, and even adults, being engaged during the event.

I saw them getting excited and having fun and creating various kinds of art, such as painting. We had a picture going that Christine had started. She’d painted trees and plants onto a frame, sort of a jungle-type theme, and each of the kids painted their version of a dinosaur. They were all different sizes; it’s kind of funny to see how each of them have different drawing styles and perceptions of dinosaurs.

How do you feel this fits in with the overall purpose of the Mission?

I think part of the purpose of Bayview Mission is to raise awareness and foster compassion in the children. So we work to get the kids together and get to know each other, so that they can know that there are other children in the neighborhood that are in similar situations to their own, and who like to have fun at Nina’s just like they do! And, it’s really an opportunity for them to take part in the safe haven that Nina and all the volunteers have created here at Bayview Mission.

Is there anything else you want to add about Dinosaur Day?

I just hope that we do it a lot more often. I’m amazed at how Bayview Mission is coming along and that we have all these new and beautiful spaces that we can use now to create space for the children. I know just yesterday they had Shark Day, where the children played on a seven-foot tall shark shaped water slide! I hope we can keep thinking of these fun themes for Saturdays, and continue to provide a safe place to play for the young kids of Bayview Hunters Point.