For Immediate Release February 22, 2005

For More Information Contact: Rich Schneider, 317-278-4564 rcschnei@iupui.edu

Children at IUPUI Center for Young Children Raise $175 for Tsunami Victims

INDIANAPOLIS - The pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, as well as several $10 and $20 bills, were in containers, ready to be combined and converted to a check that would be sent to an organization assisting victims of the tsunami disaster.

Children at the Center for Young Children at IUPUI had raised $175.36, money that will be sent to the United World Food Program.

There was only one thing left to do and the children, three to five years of age, were hard at it.

Using markers, children lay on the floor, turning sheets of paper, into heart-felt messages. Others worked on small tables. Bright colors conveyed kids' wishes that other kids a half a world apart are ok.

Donghee, 5, crouched over her paper, writing, "Are you guys ok? I hope when you are hurt you are not hurt again." Another child wote: "I love the people that got hurt."

One girl drew a colorful elephant. Why an elephant? "Because I like elephants," she said.

Ty, a five-year-old, took a blue marker and drew a flat line in blue for the ocean and a blue spiral that nearly covered his sheet of paper. The blue spiral, he said, was the tsunami.

Looking up, Ty said, "I know what caused the tsunami. It was an earth shake."

It was knowledge gained earlier when children at the center, the largest single-site campus child care center in Indiana, watched as a retired physics professor demonstrated for them what a tsunami was and the damage it could do.

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