Silver Award in the Queen's Essay Competition: "Lock Down In New Zealand" by Nathan Wordsworth

Well done to Nathan Wordsworth who achieved a "Silver Award" in the The Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition. 

The Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition, the world's oldest international writing competition for schools, has been delivered by the Royal Commonwealth Society since 1883. This year there were over 25,000 entries from around the Commonwealth making Nathan's achievement even more special.

A big thanks to Rodney Laredo who encouraged Nathan to enter this competition. Rodney runs extension writing and research groups at Redwood. Rodney was over the moon with this result and was impressed with the ownership that Nathan took with this project "Nathan picked up the ball and ran with it!"  This is not the first success of this type that Rodney has had with his writers. Nathan now joins a previous "Rodney Writer", Leon Grieg whose work was submitted for Toi Toi media’s quarterly journal. Leon's work was one of only 35 of 1500 submissions to be published. It would seem that Rodney's Writers and Researchers know no bounds!

Thanks also to Nathan's whānau for their support too - they are naturally very proud of him!

Here is Nathan's essay:

In the pandemic the whole of New Zealand went into lock down. We isolated ourselves in our houses for 9 weeks. But in that time we did a lot of interesting things that kept our minds and bodies active. Most importantly we did our best to reach out to family and friends to see how they were getting on in these unusual times.

What we would normally do now seemed to have gone. We had to think of games to play like board games but that was boring. But there were some activities that we actually liked. We built a lego gondola, we used lots of colourful bricks and fishing rod lines for the cable and mini figures. Another fun activity we did was making homemade pizza for dinner but it was hard to get yeast. Everyone was buying yeast to make bread. Because of the lock down shops had restrictions for people to go in to buy things. Everyone had to stand in line outside and wait to get in. When someone came out the next in line entered. 

 If it was a nice and very still morning we would go fishing. Sometimes we would catch big fish, sometimes small ones. We once went on a bike ride and my dad said ‘why don't we go and try some eeling with the friendly eels. My mum went to the shop and bought some cat food and that night we went and fed it to the eels. 

 By the time we got used to not being in school Mum started to get us into homeschooling. The first day was very boring but then we all started to like it because Dad was home with us. Usually he was away working. The pandemic helped us to get together but talking was difficult at times. The good thing was that we had Zoom. With zoom we could talk with others and see each other. 

Another thing we had to do online was to connect with our church. The whole family would start the service together, and then my brothers and I would leave the room to have kids church while my parents listened to the adult church service. 

Big ANZAC celebrations were cancelled. That’s when Australian and New Zealanders get together to celebrate those from our two countries who died in the great world wars for our freedom. We all decided to have small celebrations at home. We decided to make some ANZAC biscuits and poppy art and we put the art outside on our driveway to show our little street what we had done so then they could do it to show that they appreciate the work that we had attempted. 

Some of the best ways to fight the covid is to stay isolated in our homes and keep away from people that are not a part of our bubble. In my bubble was my Mum, Dad, two brothers and my grandparents. One more way is to sanitize your hands every time you enter a shop. 

We did lock down because this crazy virus came to New Zealand and killed a lot of people and of course we did not want that to happen to us. Now and again people from other countries got into New Zealand. Sometimes these visitors already had the virus before they came to our country. As they travelled with the virus it spread to other people. This helped our Prime Minister decide on locking us down early.In lock down I missed sports and family in South Africa, Australia and England. Some hobbies that I missed were cricket and soccer and playing on playgrounds.

I am writing all this down to show that my family wanted to look positively at what is a serious problem.

Here in New Zealand as in other commonwealth countries we will have to create new models of sustainable urban living. What we will have to do is improve the quality of life that will have to be seriously thought out so it won’t be a burden on future generations. We must all work together to feel better about ourselves. Better education will be a key to moving forward after covid. Prince Charles believes the way forward after covid is for policy makers to capture the imagination and will of humanity as a whole.

Nathan Wordsworth

Redwood School - 2021