Ten-year-old Oliver Marstaeller took his birthday money and put it toward an anti-bullying campaign after he heard about the tragic death of Amanda Todd last fall.
Today is Pink Shirt day, an annual day where students don a pink shirt to take a stand against bullying. Oliver, a Richard McBride Elementary student, took the event one step further with his fundraising efforts and bought each student at his school a "Stop a Bully" wristband.
"At first, I wanted to donate because my friend, he donated for his birthday, and I said I want to donate too because I have so much stuff at home," Oliver explains.
Hearing Todd's heartbreaking story the 15-year-old Port Coquitlam teen committed suicide after being cyberbul-lied - helped Oliver decide where to put the money he fundraised through his birthday.
"I just said, 'That's not right.' Imagine how sad you'd have to be to feel that way, so I decided to donate here because I just felt that it wasn't right at all," he says about Todd's story.
Stop A Bully is a national non-profit organization based in the Okanagan Valley. Trevor Knowlton wrote in an email to The Record that he founded the organization in 2009 after a bullying incident at the school where he teaches. Stop A Bully allows any student, at any school, to safely report incidents of bullying and cyberbullying to school officials. The organization sent Oliver extra wristbands, plus cards and temporary tattoos for his schoolmates.
Along with the wristbands Oliver will hand out to students today, his class - a Grade 4/5 split taught by Krishna Sharma - is also hosting the school's anti-bullying assembly today.
Oliver and his classmate Matthew Pineda wrote a rap song that they will perform for the school's more than 400 students in Kindergarten to Grade 5.
Oliver says he's "sort of" nervous to perform the song in front of his entire school, but it's hard to tell watching the outgoing 10-year-old, whose rap lyrics touch on the theme of self-esteem. Oliver says it's an angle his teacher, Ms. Sharma, encouraged him to write about because it's the focus of the school's assembly, where other students from his class will also perform.
Oliver says he's had minimal experience with bullying, though there was one incident about a year ago with another kid.
"I guess we both got under each other's skin, and then when I stopped, he didn't stop, so I just tried to avoid him sometimes," Oliver says.
While his situation fizzled out, Oliver does see a lot of instances of bullying around him, he says, but he thinks the Pink Shirt event will help make a difference.
