A School Project in Brook Hill School (Santa Rosa, California)

My name is Khouansiva Saycocie.  I am a 6th grader from Brook Hill Elementary in Santa Rosa, California.

Last year in Mr. Jackson’s class of 5th and 6th graders, they decided to do a class project.  Mrs. Ellen Bottorff, an aide at the school, loves sewing and said she’d be glad to help them make a quilt.  She has helped us make a quilt, in memory of Mr. Richard Follett (a teacher at our school who died from cancer), one for Martin Luther King Jr., and one for Columbine High School.  The class decided to make the quilt for Kosovo.  They had been hearing a lot about the war at the time.  They decided to make the quilt in the shape of a heart and have flowers with hearts sewn around them.  The hearts represent the love from our country to yours, and the flowers represent new beginning.

The quilt was finished at the end of the school year.  Mr. Jackson and his class planned on sending it to an elementary school somewhere in Kosovo.  He sent e-mail to people he found on websites that he thought could help.  He finally got in touch with a lady named Jill Cerquiera, a history teacher in New Jersey, who said she knew someone who could be of assistance.  So he e-mailed him.  Then one noon, he got a call at the school from a Captain Doane.  He said that he could indeed help; and help he did.  The quilt will be sent to the Camp Bondsteel then to its final destination.  The quilt will begin its journey in the middle of October.

Our school recently had most of it remodeled and last year had a new library built.  We felt sorry that while we’re enjoying our new classrooms, elementary school kids, like us, in Kosovo are learning in tents.  While we go home to our families and our comfy beds, they’re sleeping in sleeping bags in a tent.  Some have to face the fact that their parents won’t ever be there to comfort them anymore; that they will go to sleep without a game of catch with their Dad and a kiss goodnight from their Mom.  I don’t even want to think about it.  Staying overnight at school! The difference is, we know that after that one night we’d be going back home.  Some of them don’t even have homes to go back to or family to greet them with a hug and kiss.  Classrooms have heaters and tents don’t.  We hope when their new classrooms are built, they like them as much as we like ours.  And hopefully the quilt will give them hope for a better tomorrow and the courage to move on.

Quilt inscription:

Kosovo resource web page: http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/pages/listkosovodr.html