Outreach Speaker Amber Schuler Visits BHS!

Hello blog readers, I will tell you about a special guest that visited our school.

Today, a lady named Amber Schuler came to tell us about “Free the children”. If you didn’t know what free the children is, then I will tell you. Free the children is a non-profit organization to help people (focused on children) that don’t have enough things to survive. It started in 1995, so it has lasted 18 years.

Amber told us this story:

In 1987, four year old Iqbal Masih (pronounced Ikball Masee) was a boy who lived in a poor family. There was not a school nearby, and the closest one was multiple kilometers away. All the water was so dirty it looked like chocolate milk. These men, one day, had come to Iqbal’s small village to “give children a better life” (go to school, give them clean water and good food etc.). Once the men came to Iqbal’s house, his parents agreed hoping it would be better for their small Iqbal. His parents were given a contract, but they had not gone to school and did not know how to read, so they signed the contract with a fingerprint. The parents were paid 600 rupees (approximately $16 dollars) Iqbal was taken to a gloomy carpet factory, where his nimble miniature hands tied knots for carpets. He was all chained up to prevent him from egress (to leave).  He miraculously escaped the factory in 1993 (age 10) and for two years, traveled around telling the world about child labour and how wrong it was. In 1995 (age 12) he returned to his home in Pakistan to see his family. He was riding his bike with his cousins to visit his uncle. Laughing, having fun, riding his bike with his cousins that was the life. During the ride, a horrible thing happened. Suddenly, his cousin was shot in the arm and Iqbal was fatally shot by who is thought to be the carpet factory men for exposing the child labour secret. Halfway around the world, in Toronto Canada, a twelve year old boy by the name of Craig Keilburger, the same age as Iqbal, was searching in the newspaper before school for his morning comics and saw the horrific headline. TWELVE YEAR OLD PAKISTAN BOY MURDERED!!!  Craig went to school that day and asked his teacher if he could explain his reading. His teacher said yes, and he read the article aloud. After he read the article, he explained how important he thought it was to start a club to help the needy people of the world of all of these horrifying things. He asked if anyone wanted to join, and gradually, 11 hands of Craig’s friends rose. Their club was named “twelve twelve year olds” but when one turned thirteen, it was changed to free the children. Today, only Craig remains in the group, but plenty others have joined.

I got a very powerful message when this was told to us. At our school we have a club and we fundraise to donate to free the children, and that is how we got Amber to come to our school. We have helped to start building a whole school in El Trapiche, Nicaragua and when we do another fundraiser, this makes me want to be part of it more than before. I hope free the children can help many more places worldwide. People like Craig make this world a lot better. This was a very powerful message to everyone in our class and the other two grades that came.

Thank you Amber from everyone in our class.

-Alex