By Shreeji Patel and Shivani Arivuchelvan
Last week, Westlake Girls celebrated Youth Peace Week.
The Peace Foundation of New Zealand promotes this annual event which encourages young people to think about how we can work together to promote a more peaceful community, country, and world. We also reflect upon the importance of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s long standing nuclear-free policy.
This year at Westlake Girls, we focused on the theme of the power of unity, which is a relevant theme amidst our present-day conflicts. To celebrate peace, as a school we held multiple events including our annual paper crane-folding tradition in remembrance of Sadako Sasaki, a young victim of the gruelling Hiroshima atomic bombings in WW2.
On the Tuesday of Peace Week, we had the great opportunity to hear about Bob Narev’s Holocaust survival story. Along with this, we organised a lunchtime peace/unity quiz and to finish the week off, we hosted our all-time favourite Project Runway.
During this week, we had the wonderful opportunity to collaborate with Rosmini College students. As they say “the world is our town and everyone is our family”, hence by celebrating this great event, we as the leaders of the future came to realise that the way of peace begins with love, respect, and unity.