Kids from New Hampshire launched a miniature boat into the ocean. More than a year later, a fellow middle schooler found it – in Norway.
CBSN
In February 2022, a sixth-grader named Karel in Norway found a tiny boat that had washed ashore on a small island called Smøla. The boat was from Rye – but Rye isn't nearby. It's in New Hampshire, thousands of miles away. While the boat was foreign, its senders were not so different from Karel: Fellow middle schoolers launched it.
Sheila Adams' class made the miniature boat with help from Educational Passages, which teaches kids about ocean currents, weather, technology — and apparently, Norway. Her 2020 class at Rye Junior High started the boat project, but when the pandemic hit, they put it on hold. The next class picked it up and launched it the Atlantic Ocean from a bigger boat in October 2020, filling it with notes and and other mementos – like a mask they had all signed.
"Our boat started going north. So I really thought it would go to Ireland or somewhere," Molly Flynn, who was a part of the project with her class in 2020, told CBS News.
Ashley White received her earliest combat action badge from the United States Army soon after the first lieutenant arrived in Afghanistan. The silver military award, recognizing soldiers who've been personally engaged by an attacker during conflict, was considered an achievement in and of itself as well as an affirming rite of passage for the newly deployed. White had earned it for using her own body to shield a group of civilian women and children from gunfire that broke out in the midst of her third mission in Kandahar province. All of them survived. She never mentioned the badge to anyone in her battalion.