From St. Eustache with love

Students hope to raise awareness of Darfur conflict

A recent class project made Grade 6 student Samantha Rush happy to be living in Canada.

Rush, a student at École St. Eustache School, and her classmates have been studying the conflict in the Sudanese province of Darfur. It’s a project teacher Danys Lachance says has opened their young eyes to the wider world.

“I had no clue about what was going on in Darfur,” said Rush. “But we watched a movie about it and learned about it in our class.

“We all want to do something, so at least they’ll know there are people who know about them and care about them.”

That something was the creation of “Peace Tiles,” part of an art project allowing the St. Eustache students a chance to express their own feelings about the situation in Africa.

“What we’ve been working on is a unit on accepting differences,” said Lachance, “and a co-worker of mine was involved in organizing the Run 4 Darfur, so we felt it led nicely into what we were doing.”

Lachance said after learning about the African conflict and watching the acclaimed film “The Lost Boys of Darfur,” his students asked if they could do something to help.

“They just couldn’t believe that something like this could be happening in this day and age,” said Lachance.

“The tiles are just a way for them to express how they feel.”

Teacher Roxanne Sarrazin, who was involved with the organization of Run 4 Darfur, an Oct. 7 fund/awareness-raiser at Assiniboine Park, where the students’ tiles were on display.

“They (were) exposed at the start of the run, along with the students’ writeups so people could see what they’re all about,” said Lachance.

Sarrazin teaches some of St. Eustache’s younger students, and she said while the Grade 5 kids could handle some more graphic details about Darfur’s atrocities, it was harder to get her Grade 3 class involved in the project.

She said she hopes the letter-writing will make the students more aware of the outside world and will hopefully become better global citizens.

“But you don’t want to traumatize them,” she said.

“You have to try to see it through an eight-year-old’s world. What we’re having them do is write a letter to someone in a (refugee) camp...a ‘dear new friend’ kind of thing.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to actually send them out.”

That’s a goal Lachance shares. The teacher has been contacting various aid organizations to see if the students’ projects can be sent directly to Darfur.

“That’s the goal,” he said. “We want to let them know there are kids in Canada who are paying attention and who care about what’s happening over there.”