Pembina Trails students paint 15K tile human rights mosaic
Pembina Trails Human Rights Project to feature 15,000 panels painted by students, staff
The life experiences of two Winnipeg students who came to Canada from Africa are among the 15,000 stories being told through art as part of a massive exhibit organized by the Pembina Trails School Division and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
The Pembina Trails Human Rights Project will feature a mosaic of 15,000 eight-by-10-inch panels painted by students and staff from the division's 33 schools, highlighting what human rights — including children's rights — mean to them.
Seven students showed off their art panels at a sneak peek event at the museum on Thursday morning, including Nasra Ahmed Siraj and Maltha Uwanmajimana.
The two Acadia Junior High students immigrated to Canada from east Africa. Nasra, 13, had lived in Ethiopia and Somalia, while 12-year-old Maltha was born in Tanzania.
"It's pretty empowering to watch them take hold of those rights and then bring them to the classroom, so to know that their community is based on the rights that they have," said Kelly Martin, an English as an Additional Language teacher at Acadia Junior High.
Nasra lived the first years of her life without access to clean drinking water. She recalled people having to drink dirty water from a lake in Somalia.
Her panel highlights the global right to clean water and the importance of not wasting water.
"When you're brushing your teeth, like, close the tap. My mom tells me [that] all the time," Nasra said.
Maltha's panel illustrates education as an important human right. She said before she and her family came to Canada, her four sisters and three brothers could not go to school because their parents could not afford to send all their children.
"There wasn't like free education, so not everybody was allowed to go to school," she said.
Maltha said being in Canada has given the entire family opportunities not just to go to school, but to play sports and meet new people, she said.
The full mosaic will be on display at Investors Group field on May 20-21, while 99 of the panels will be shown at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights at a later date.
The Pembina Trails School Division says it's the first school division in Canada to create a human rights art installation of this scale. A total of 13,000 students in Grades 1 to 12, as well as 2,000 staff members, are taking part.