The CNN Freedom Project

On this 4th of March, the Oeiras international school students had the amazing opportunity of participating in an online event organised by CNN news. It was a panel discussion hosted by Becky Anderson’s. Becky is the CNN Anchor for Connect the World in Abu Dhabi and was joined by Siddharth Kara and Ruth Dearnley. Siddharth Kara is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Human Rights as he writes and does research on modern slavery. Dearnley is the founder of Stop the Traffik, which is a foundation focused on preventing human trafficking.

Six schools were invited to participate, being schools in Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Sierra Leone, and Oeiras with OIS being the only one in Portugal. Each school had around 10 to 15 students between the ages of 12 to 18 years old, joining virtually over zoom, due to social distancing, where they were allowed to participate in the discussing through the coordinated polls and Q&A's within the show where students typed their questions in the zoom chat. We know where the students are from as our students had to put the first name and the city. We are very proud of João Rias and Yuntong Deng who were chosen to ask a question.

The students from our school that were part of this wonderful experience were: Ana Batista (Year 13), Ruoshan Zhang (year 13), Pietro Perino (year 13), Yuntong Deng (year 13), Thomas Godinho (year 13), Leonor Garcia (year 13), João Rias (year 12), Mariana Soares (year 12), Teresa Ayala (year 11), Sara Mateus (year 11), Ronghao Wang (year 11), Tomás Moura(year 8) and Brenda Zhao (yea 8).

We were very fortunate to be representing the school worldwide and to be able to spread awareness about modern slavery and help make a change. If you wish to not only support our students and educate yourself on the matters of forced labour and human trafficking please done into the CNN show on Tuesday 16th of March, during Becky’s two-hour show between 4-5 pm.