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Young students use toothbrushes to find and honor veterans
Stars and Stripes ^ | 5/21/15 | Bradley

Posted on 05/22/2015 9:56:11 AM PDT by pabianice

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Tribune News Service) — A group of French-speaking 8th graders used toothbrushes to clean moss off old tombstones of African-American military veterans.

Not something you see everyday in Kansas City.

But there they were, 25 or so students from Academie Lafayette working to get Highland Cemetery, a segregated black cemetery from Kansas City’s early days, ready for Memorial Day. They planted flags on graves long forgotten in a cemetery long neglected.

Seems like such goodwill deserved blue sky and sunshine.

Aucune une telle chance. Uh, no such luck.

It was 52 degrees, breezy and spitting rain.

The kids didn’t care. After teachers and students gathered to discuss the game plan — speaking French, as usual — the kids sank knees in wet grass and hands in cold mud. They worked carefully with squirt bottles and two-for-a-dollar toothbrushes to expose names and dates that hadn’t been lit by sunshine in decades.

“They haven’t been honored the way they should be and I like doing this for them and their families,” Lily Linebach-Dehart, an 8th grader at the French immersion K-8 charter school, said as she dabbed an engraved name like she was cleaning a cut. “No one was able to find their names, to know who they were and what they did.”

(Excerpt) Read more at stripes.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: honor; memorialday; remember; remembrance

1 posted on 05/22/2015 9:56:11 AM PDT by pabianice
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To: pabianice

Well done kids. Kudos to their instructor.


2 posted on 05/22/2015 10:18:21 AM PDT by rjsimmon (The Tree of Liberty Thirsts)
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To: pabianice

well that brought tears to my eyes....Bless these children and adults


3 posted on 05/22/2015 10:45:17 AM PDT by curdogmen
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To: pabianice
The service and the loyalty (we) owe, In doing it, pays itself. --Shakespeare
4 posted on 05/22/2015 11:24:44 AM PDT by onedoug
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To: pabianice

IIRC they make the School Kids in Normandy clean and decorate the Graves on D-Day in Thanks and Remembrance for the Allies Freeing them from the Nazi’s.


5 posted on 05/22/2015 11:25:48 AM PDT by mabarker1 (congress, The Opposite of Progress.)
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To: pabianice

thank you! We needed a little good news.


6 posted on 05/22/2015 11:35:18 AM PDT by Calpublican (No Comprendo)
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