Every year at Christmas time, Mrs. Dorsey’s Grade 3 students at Abbotsford’s Dr. Roberta Bondar Elementary School writes letters to local firefighters thanking them for all they’ve done to keep locals safe.
But after her students witnessed some of the scary scenes of local flooding and the heroic acts of the Canadian military, her pupils asked if they could also pen notes to members of the Canadian Armed Forces.
Dorsey quickly agreed and said the floods have been challenging for her students to watch and be so close to.
“The children are talking a lot about the floods and how bad they feel for the people affected,” she said. “Many of my children know someone who has been affected. I have four families that have people staying with them because of the floods. The children who have someone staying with them are more worried because they are hearing about the floods from the people staying with them.”
She said after the students felt a lot better about the flooding situation after students became aware that CAF members had arrived and were helping out.
“The kids came to school and started talking about how the soldiers were here and now we would be safe,” she said.
When Ms. Greenway’s Grade 5 class heard about the plans to write letters to the military they decided to join in and a total of 75 letters were written.
Dorsey saw that Mayor Henry Braun was visiting Huntingdon Village and interacting with some of the forces and decided to send the letters through him.
“I know how busy the men and women are dealing with the floods and did not want to get in the way,” she said. “The message from the city was to stay away from flooded areas and let the men and women do their work.”
She dropped the letters off at Abbotsford city hall and hopes that they put a smile on the faces of those who helped out.
“The children really enjoyed writing the letters because they could relate because the floods are happening here,” she said. “They wrote such nice messages – they thanked the soldiers for coming to help us, they drew Christmas pictures on the top of the letters and one girl wrote, ‘The World Is A Better Place Because You Are In It’ and ‘You will always have a place in my heart’. I let the children write their own messages, I did not correct their spelling because I wanted the messages to clearly be from the children. I believe it helped them deal with what is happening by showing their appreciation.”
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