Dubai students send poems and cards to Nelson Mandela

Dubai: Five eager sixth grade students from a Dubai school handed over a collection of poems written by them, along with drawings and get-well cards from younger students, to the South African Consul General in Dubai, so he could deliver it to Nelson Mandela.

The five students — representing their class of 20 students as well as their school — and some teachers from Deira International School, met the Consul General, Manabile Shogole, on Thursday at the consulate.

“In their literacy and humanities lessons, they have been studying Africa, and they have branched off into South Africa, where we looked into apartheid in South Africa and investigated that and looked at Nelson Mandela as a freedom fighter… and the ultimate project was compiling those poems,” Jacqueline Visser, the sixth grade teacher, told Gulf News.

“They wrote the poems from the perspective of a black south African living during apartheid times,” she added.

She said that what was amazing is that they wrote those poems in class, without any help, just as a reflection of what they learned and read about South Africa and Mandela.

“When I saw what they did, I thought we cannot keep this a secret! Because they were fantastic, so we decided that somehow we would like this to reach Mr Mandela, because its everything he believed in and they [the students] had seem to have understood and agreed with it.”

What makes this interesting, Jacqueline explained, is that these are children from all over the world, and not South Africans.

The package the student handed over included some 20 poems written by them and their classmates, some drawings — also by the sixth graders, get-well cards from four-year-old kindergarteners, and a letter by one of the South African teachers in the school, explaining the package.

Jacqueline said that the kindergarten students were taught who Mandela is in simple child talk. She added with Mandela being sick, they wanted to show that children all over the world agree with his ethics and respect him.

Shogole thanked the students and teachers on behalf of Mandela, and said “they will reach South Africa and Mr Mandela specifically, no later than next week, as next Sunday it will be sent to South Africa.”

He spoke to the students about South Africa and Mandela, and told them to focus on their education, as it will open many doors of opportunities for them.

Anjay Singh, a Trinidadian student, said that when they wrote these poems, “we did not expect it to be so big, we just wrote them out of what we knew — it was odd how this turned into something much bigger.”