Mazda New Zealand had a fundraising campaign last month, committing to donating $1000 to Make a Wish Foundation for every 1000 origami peace cranes made and delivered to a local dealership.

Shirley Boys' High School decided to take up the challenge in conjunction with Avonside Girls' High School international students and their Japanese classes. We only found out about the challenge in the last week of May so that gave us seven days to make as many cranes as possible.

Shirley Boys' High School international students were great and even made cranes in their own time. They were often the tutors in some of the subject and form classes. Many students and classes at Shirley Boys' High School contributed to the massive effort. Kazuki Kikuchi made 235 cranes in one weekend to give us a good start to our goal, which was initially 1000 cranes in the last week of May.

By Wednesday we had surpassed the 1000 cranes and our goal shifted to 2000 cranes. Many of the cranes were sewn into the strands that are similar to those on display at Hiroshima.

The Shirley Boys' High School Japanese class contributed significant amounts along with 9R Science class.  The ESOL class were also huge contributors. We received cranes from many other subject classes as well as Form classes – JBm made the most cranes from any of form classes. Harley Bean of 9J made 99 cranes himself which we sewed to together to form a strand – wonderful effort!

By lunchtime on Friday 28th May we had surpassed 3000 cranes. These were taken to Blackwell Motors by some of the international students (Homare, Taka, Kyota, Kazuki, Kotaro and Naoyuki). The total for Christchurch was over 16000 cranes so we are very proud of what Shirley Boys' High School contributed towards this very worthwhile cause.

The message below was received from the Make a Wish Foundation:

“On behalf of Make-A-Wish I would like to say a huge thank you for your support of the Make-A-Wish and Mazda Paper Crane Project.

3000 cranes is a phenomenal effort! We are extremely grateful as this certainly goes a long way towards helping grant more special wishes to children and young people aged 3 –17 years who have a critical medical condition”.

A huge thank you to everyone who contributed.

Sue Nesbit