Pennies from Hana
Never underestimate the power of a penny.
Hana School students collected 81,000 of the coppers – including 13,000 by the 1st-graders alone – for a Pennies for Peace program affiliated with four best-selling books, more than 130 schools in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan, and social studies curriculums for kindergarten through 12th grade.
The books are “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time” and “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Journey to Change the World, One Child at a Time,” both co-authored by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin; “Listen to the Wind: The Story of Dr. Greg and Three Cups of Tea” co-authored by Mortenson and Susan L. Roth; and “Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan” written by Mortenson and published last year.
Mortenson based the books on his experiences establishing or supporting 131 schools serving 58,000 children, including 44,000 girls, in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan. The 523-year-old Minnesota native co-founded the nonprofit Central Asian Institute, which launched the Pennies for Peace project. Last year, Mortenson received Pakistan’s highest civilian award, Sitar-e-Pakistan, or Star of Pakistan, for his 16-year humanitarian campaign to promote education and literacy in some of that country’s wildest areas.
Enter: Hana High and Elementary School’s involvement in Pennies for Peace, courtesy of social studies teacher Melody Cosma-Gonsalves and English teacher Kau’i Kanaka’ole.
“I got the book, I read it and fell in love with it,” said Cosma-Gonsalves, who had chosen “Three Cups of Tea” based on a recommendation by elementary reading teacher Christel Blumer-Buell.
“I was inspired by just the selfless giving, without expecting anything in return, with just a pure heart and no hidden agendas,” Cosma-Gonsalves recalled.
In turn, she introduced the book and an accompanying curriculum to a fourth-quarter class of 20 world-history students, and Kanaka’ole also used the text to incorporate English language-arts standards for the same class.
“It was a way for me to introduce human-rights issues,” Cosma-Gonsalves said, “like building schools, especially for girls, who should not be educated and should stay at home in Pakistan and Afghanistan; that’s how their culture is.”
Then she introduced her students to the website youthforhuman rights.org that lists 30 “human rights” – including “that everyone should be educated, that everyone should have food, that everyone should have access to medical care,” the Kamehameha Schools Kapalama and University of Hawaii at Hilo graduate said.
Meanwhile, Mortenson’s mother, Jerene Mortenson, came to Maui last March from Anchorage, Alaska, to tell the American Association of University Women about “Three Cups of Tea” – drawing the group’s largest audience this year – at the same time Hana students “learned a lot of character-building skills” by studying humanitarianism.
After finishing “Three Cups of Tea,” the youths wrote Mortenson letters, whose theme was the same, Cosma-Gonsalves noted.
“The kids sometimes feel they don’t have enough, but when they read this book, they learned . . . they’re truly blessed to live where they live, to have a roof over their heads, to wake up to the sound of the ocean, music and birds, while kids over there get up to the sound of guns and bombs.”
Top penny collectors in various grade divisions were the 1st grade – including Cosma-Gonsalves’ 6-year-old daughter, Makali’i – with about $130; 5th grade with approximately $110; 6th grade with some $17, and 11th grade with about $57.
And, Cosma-Gonsalves indicated, the lessons were priceless.
“Even though we’re in an isolated community in Hana, and during these tough economic times, we dug deep to help those even less fortunate. It was a good way to keep perspective on the materialistic things we have versus what you can get with just love and aloha,” the sixth-year Hana instructor said.
“That was my goal: just to share a little bit of aloha with children on the other side of the sky; that’s what I kept on telling my students.”
(c) The Maui News 2010
http://www.mauinews.com/page/content.detail/id/532308.html
