Today, to start off, Leanne Johnson came into the school to talk to us about The 5 St Kilda mail boats being sent from different point of Shetland, to send a distress signal to the Mainland. The reason behind this is because is because rural parts of Shetland are in distress because the council is trying to close a variety of schools across the island, including Aith, the one were suppose to be going to after summer. The council is taking children from there community’s and their family’s to schools much further away on buses which will take more than hour to drive to those schools. The mail boat is called Trysht which is a Shetland word for struggle and frustration. All of the five boats will have a bottle within them that holds messages from the secondary children who are currently being threatened with the closer of their secondary 3-4 departments.
The boat comes from St Kilda which was an island in the north. Their quickest way to get messages was by the boats there was one that only took a week to get to the mainland. The messages inside were usually written to get help when someone was ill or was in distress.