A Morinville student is off to Europe next month after submitting a prize-winning poem to a military history contest.
Grade 11 student Sydney Thiessen, 16, is among six Alberta winners of a nine-day, all-expenses paid trip to France, Belgium and the Netherlands to tour Canadian battlefields including Juno Beach, the Somme and Vimy Ridge. She leaves July 2.
"I was so excited," she said, of learning the news in late May. "I've never been anywhere overseas."
The contest is sponsored by The Military Museums, located in Calgary.
Thiessen, a student at Morinville Community High School, won for a poem called Blood December, which commemorates the bloody battle for Ortona, Italy in December 1943. Though it was a short, eight-day battle, it claimed 1,373 Canadians.
The death toll and the brutality associated with that battle inspired Thiessen to learn more about it and pen a poem lamenting the forgetfulness of subsequent generations.
"They gave their lives for us to be free," she said.
The poem says that nearly 70 years later, battles like this are "lost in a sea of neglect" due to the "ignorance of latter generations."
"This unholy Christmas to be remembered only when obliged," the poem says.
A number of other Morinville students entered the contest, encouraged by their social studies teacher Rosie Kruhlak.
Malorie Fitzgerald, 17, won a $500 prize for second place for a short story entitled My Hands, which outlined the important roles played by women during the two world wars.
"I was proud of myself," said Fitzgerald, who spends a fair amount of time "writing on the side."
"It's kind of cool that this is the first time any of my writing has been recognized by anything," she said.
The contest drew about 70 entries from across Alberta, mostly from Calgary since that's where the museum is based, Kruhlak said.
It's the first year she's had students enter. The contest is a good way to stimulate learning because it allows for more creativity than a typical essay. Yet it also fits the curriculum's coverage of Canada's peacekeeping history and contributions to the world wars, she said.
Fighter pilot for a day
Another component of the contest was a draw for a one-hour flight in a fighter jet over the Rocky Mountains, which Kruhlak won. This draw was open to the teachers of the students who submitted. Kruhlak will take her flight sometime this summer.
"I have put in a request for a Tom Cruise look-alike pilot," she joked.
