PHOTO BY TERRA ALLEN

KATERI MACKEY MOSELEY (LEFT) INTERVIEWS HER SENIOR BUDDY TOSHI FUJITA AT MILLRIDGE VILLAGE IN MILTON.

Generations come together

By Matt Nagle

At Alice V. Hedden Elem-entary School in Edgewood, Terra Allen’s fifth-grade class spent time this past school year making friends with senior citizens at Mill Ridge Village in Milton. Each student teamed up with a senior "buddy," interviewed him or her and wrote a story about their buddy’s life that they then read to the Mill Ridge Village residents.

"In this way, we are experiencing ‘living history’ and creating connections and understanding between generations," Allen said. "It was also so wonderful and sweet to see the kids and the seniors together."

The partnership between the students and seniors formed through a class exercise based on a concept called "Pay it Forward," which stems from the book "Pay it Forward" by Catherine Ryan Hyde. Part of a national movement among schools seeking to motivate students to help make their communities better, the idea is simple: "‘Pay it forward’ is when you do something nice for somebody," said May Aya-Ay one of Allen’s students, and from there a chain reaction begins.

"Somebody does something nice for you and you do something nice for three people and then each one of those people do something nice for three more people," explained another of Allen’s students, Kateri Mackey Moseley.

"So the first person who does something nice ends up making it better for everyone," Aya-Ay added.

The Pay it Forward Foun-dation, established in Septem-ber 2000 by the author and others, aims to educate and inspire students to realize that they can change the world. By bringing the author’s vision and related materials into classrooms internationally, students and their teachers are encouraged to formulate their own ideas of how they can "pay it forward."

"She really wanted us to be involved with that," said Moseley about her teacher. "She thought that if we would be involved with the community it would be really easy to ‘pay it forward.’"

The students first visited Mill Ridge Village at Christmas time where they sang carols for the residents who were so taken by the youngsters that they asked them to come back. From there the idea blossomed for the students to sit down and talk one-on-one with a senior buddy.

"Some of the kids were a little reluctant, a little nervous about talking to someone older," Allen said. "It was interesting to watch them as they started talking and listening to their stories and playing cards with them. They really opened up. Both of them really enjoyed it. It was fun to watch."

Moseley’s buddy was 85-year-old Toshi Fujita. "She graduated from Franklin High School, in Seattle, in the year 1939," Moseley wrote. "After graduation, she was 18, she went to Charette’s Costume Design School. The school was in Seattle, WA. Sadly, Toshi did not get a job at once because of World War II. She was brought to a camp because she is Japanese, and there taught a class on designing and sewing women’s clothing."

Moseley said she "vaguely" knew about the Japanese internment camps before she met Fujita, but meeting someone who was actually in one made it real to her.

"Learning that she had to be there was pretty hard, because I wouldn’t like it if somebody said just because I’m this color or this background I had to stay there and couldn’t go anywhere else," Moseley said.

Aya-Ay made friends with Marjorie McGlenn. "My buddy told me about her life, that she grew up in Puyallup and that her husband died three years ago. They bought a house in West Seattle. She’s only been at Mill Ridge for seven months."

"The more I can tie in the classroom to the real world the more powerful and meaningful it is," Allen said. "I wanted them to write and the best way to do that is through personal experience yourself or someone you interact with because now they care about it. It’s not, ‘I have to write this paper because the teacher told me to.’ It’s ‘I’ve met this person and I know them and I’m giving them a gift and creating a relationship.’"

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