Before the magnitude 7.0 earthquake even hit Haiti more than five months ago, the students at Ă©cole Marie Poburan knew that they were going to do something really good for the kids of that small Caribbean island. After the earthquake, it became even more important.
The school is involved with Project Love, an initiative of the Canadian Organization for Development through Education (CODE). Its philosophy is to enable schoolchildren to act locally for the larger cause of promoting education and literacy globally. Since it ties in so well with the Social Studies curriculum and in general to the school’s philosophy of service to others, Grade 3 teachers Carmen Vale and Dominique Nelson encouraged their classes and the entire student body to conduct heartfelt fundraising efforts in order to buy school supplies for the devastated francophone country. In the end more than $700 was brought in, enough to compile 260 educational kits complete with scribblers, pencils, erasers, and rulers. The children also wrote form letters to include with the kits but some wrote their own special notes to the unknown recipients to show that each package was sent with love.
Vale described the impact that the whole project had on the students.
“They tell us that they feel really good in their hearts,” she said, remembering specifically the letter that one little boy wrote. “He was really quite touching with the letter that he wrote on his own. He mentioned, ‘God bless you,’ and he said, ‘I wanted to give you this because you need it more than I do.’”
Poburan has made Project Love an ongoing tradition in its culture. While it originated in the Grade 3 classes, Vale and Nelson saw interest from the larger student body. Every year it chooses a different country on which to focus its efforts. The message of ‘doing something small and simple that ends up having a large and profound impact’ has influenced and interested the greater student body to the point where they had to get everyone involved.
“We just found it suitable to open it to all,” Nelson said. “We wanted them to show that somebody from far, far away can help somebody else and that, even as children, they can still touch and influence somebody else’s life.”
