On the 24th of May, 2012, six year seven and eights from Wellsford school went to the Telstra clear event center for national young leaders day, and I was one of them. We had to start of the day by waking up really early around about 6:00! We had to get to school really fast so that we wouldn’t make everyone else late, everybody was so tired but we managed to stay awake the whole time. Once I had got to school just about everyone else that was going to the trip as well was already there. I had to put a wristband on my wrist that told me that I was a student and that I was student number 01432 that means that there was going to be 1500 other students there, and over 100 other schools! It was time to leave school and drive into Auckland, so me and two other students (their names are Emma and Daniel) piled into the back of Daniel’s dad’s car and we were off, the 101km trip was long and boring, it took 1 hour and 20 minutes to get there and we were glad to get there because Daniel’s dad’s car seat had dog hair all over it, and it got all over our clothes! At the events center everything got muddled up, and we had parked in the wrong spot, we didn’t want to get dog hair all over our clothes again, so we stood up in the back of Daniel’s dad’s van, we where lucky that the back windows were tinted, but the front weren’t! Everyone who was walking towards the van that we were in could see us standing up. After a while we eventually found our parking spot and we nervously headed inside the building. The first thing we noticed was the massive amount of people that was inside the building to me there seemed about 3 times as much people than what it seemed on my wristband on it was still nice and cool inside the building, we all stood around and waited for something, but nothing happened, we got tired of standing around so we walked around looking for the door, and we found it. When we were entering the huge room that was on the other side of the door, a lady came to us and gave us a booklet with a big number 12 on the front! In side this booklet we were supposed to write down the name of the speakers and what inspirational things that they said. We were looking around for our seats that were reserved for us, we found them all the way on the other side of the room! There were two huge projector screen mounted on the walls high above us with a camera sweeping across massive amount of kids, and showing their faces on the screen. We sat in the middle of the room on chairs that were all linked together with a hook and holder on each one, we waited for what seemed like a whole day, for everyone to come into the room and take a seat. When everyone had finally taken their seat the first speaker came out to welcome us, it was Sam Johnson, he was the leader of the student army that helped clean up Christchurch he taught us that we can make a difference with what we have in our pockets, the next speaker was Dave Atkinson, he was so funny, and he told us four things: 1. Leaders stick up for right, 2. Leaders choose good friends 3. Leaders live for others 4. That there is a penguin in every banana. The third speaker was Cam Calkcoen, he is a disabled athlete who is very good at 200m and 400m sprints, and he trains at the gym 28 hours a week. He taught us to keep at goals to succeed. The next speaker is Dillon Boucher, he is a Tall Black and Breaker’s player. He taught us to keep training and to never give up. The next speaker was Anna Mac she is a singer, she sings the song “Girl in Stilettos” she wrote her first song “strawberries” when she was five, she taught us that you are never too young to start. Then it was time for lunch and while we were eating our lunch we decided that we had seen enough, made a group decision to go home, so we did. It was a very inspiring day, and a very long one. By: Ken
National Young Leaders Day- By Ken
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