There’s a climbing wall in the gym at Elim Christian College in Botany. It's divided into seven different tracks, with phrases of encouragement written alongside “do your best, love, trust God.”
These phrases urge you to keep going and keep fighting all the way to the ceiling.
The sentiment is big at the school, the message that life keeps going, that you have to keep moving even when you’ve been brought to your knees.
Those seven tracks stand for the six students and teacher who went to camp and never came home.
Natasha Bray, Portia McPhail, Tom Hsu, Anthony Mulder, Floyd Fernandes, Tara Gregory and Tony McClean were swept away in flash flooding on the Mangetepopo River in 2008.
In this weeks Newsmakers Revisted we talk about how the school got through it and why, 16 years later, he wonders if they did enough for the survivors at the time. (Source: 1News)
Principal Murray Burton calls them his Seven in Heaven.
He received the first call that some of his teens hadn’t returned from a canoeing activity at about six as he was packing his bag to leave the school for the night.
Burton says he still remembers everything about the evening: the police calls, the community coming to the auditorium, standing in front of parents whose children had died but were under police orders to stay quiet.
The story was a major news event dominating the news cycle for days.
It has always struck me and others in the newsroom how the school handled it: Burton not only spoke to the media but invited us in and allowed their grief to play out on national television.
I have often wondered what led them to that decision. Was it their faith? Burton says that was part of it, but mainly, they were led by the kids and parents and what felt right.
In this week's Newsmakers Revisted, we discuss how the school got through it and why, 16 years later, he wonders if they did enough for the survivors at the time.
All of the Newsmakers Revisited episodes are available on TVNZ+.
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