PENTICTON – It was a very special day for hundreds of students at a school in the community of Calvaire in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, on May 16. The students ran around joyously on their school grounds enjoying handmade gifts from elementary school students in Penticton. It was back in April that Leona Tank’s grade 4 and grade 5 split class at Wiltse Elementary School was hard at work hard making more than 200 pencil cases for those students in Haiti.
“It’s pretty special because they don’t have that much,” says 10-year-old Jordan Dobrew, a grade 5 student at Wiltse Elementary School. “They don’t have a Staples that they can just go to and buy one of those nice pencil cases, they don’t have that much.”
Leona Tank, had the students in her class take on a ‘random acts of kindness’ project last fall where they were encouraged to do just that.
“They say things like ‘Miss Tank, I shoveled my neighbor’s driveway and didn’t even tell them,’” explains Tank.
Tank wanted to find a way to make the project more international in scope. After the students learned there would be Okanagan representation on an upcoming Canadian mission to Haiti, they had an idea: to make pencil cases for all 230 students at the Haitian school.
Using just resealable bags, duct tape and some hard work, the pencil cases were made. Global Okanagan’s Neetu Garcha joined a group of more than 20 other volunteers with the Canadian charity in Haiti, Live Different, and took the special gifts from the students in Penticton with her last month. The Haitian students were also shown footage of their Canadian friends hard at work making the pencil cases. Live Different’s manager of operations for Dominican Republic and Haiti, Cole Brown, says they’re gifts the students will cherish.
A week later, it was a special day back in Penticton when the students in Tank’s class were shown video footage of how their gifts were received in Haiti, with young smiles being shared across a continent.
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