This past March was dedicated to Francophonie in the United States and looking into the various ways it has impacted Americans and the rest of the world. In honor of the occasion, the New York Public Library invited a number of esteemed panelists from various United Nations organizations to participate in The Little Prince Day Conference on Friday 28 March. Between the display of a short Youtube video about the project and a large banner advocating the end of “les enfants-soldats” or child soldiers, the honored guests of the afternoon discussed the work they were doing to achieve an end to the deployment of children in armed conflicts.

            In the same vein, to pay homage to the author of The Little Prince and the ongoing fight for children’s rights, the French Heritage Language Program (FHLP), in collaboration with l’Organisation Internationale de Francophonie and la Succession Antoine Saint-Exupéry d’Agay, held an essay-writing competition for its Francophone students in the City.

           
Two of the winners of the competition, high schoolers Kervens Saint-Surin from Newcomers High School in Queens and Cambel Iribuka from Claremont International High School in the Bronx read their inspiring entries to a small and captivated audience at the New York Public Library. 

            Kervens wrote an essay imploring the Little Prince to revisit the Earth, insisting that his lessons were needed, in light of the situation of restavek children in his home country of Haiti. To combat the violence perpetuated by racism and prejudice in the world, Kervens told his audience that “what’s important is not seen with the eyes but with the heart” or untranslated, “l’essentiel se voit avec le cœur pas avec les yeux”.

            Cambel Iribuka followed up with a hopeful poem on both the failures and successes of children’s rights movements. He also urged the Little Prince to return to Earth, not so much out of necessity, but out of solidarity with him and the rest of the world’s children. The end of Cambel’s poem set the tone of the event:

“Si un jour tu as l’opportunité

Reviens sur terre, on va

Eduquer

Ces adultes vont pouvoir arrêter

Arrêter de nous maltraiter

Les choses ne seront plus

Comme elles étaient”

Events like these help highlight the work that still needs to be done in obtaining children’s rights around the world, while maintaining a certain optimism about the future.

The turnout of the two winning students’ friends and supporters certainly suggests that Cambel’s concluding hope could be fulfilled.  The students proved that they could be their own “Petit Prince” and serve as an inspiration to others to continue the struggle to end human and children’s rights violations by promoting literacy and multilingualism for all.

For those who wish to read the complete winning entries and see more pictures of the event, here is a link to the French Heritage Language Program Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.514933751949274.1073741845.117834618325858&type=1

To learn more about the French Heritage Language Program (FHLP) and its vibrant, young participants, visit their website at http://www.facecouncil.org/fhlp/.

This article was written by Mahashraya Sundararaman