Beverley Naidoo

To mark World Book Day on Thursday 4th March 2004, the Crossings project set up a video conference linking pupils from Thandokhulu High School in Cape Town with their peers in Ilfracombe College.

Award-winning children's author, Beverley Naidoo, ran the Cape Town workshop from Robben Island, using the video conference unit placed there by the DCS Crossings project to conduct a question and answer session about her new book "Baba's Gift".

Beverley was a teenager in apartheid South Africa when peaceful demonstators were shot and killed and her experiences inform all of the books she has written for young people.

"We can remain very blinkered in our own environment," Beverley said. "It's important that we go beyond our own experiences and connect with other people. Through a work of fiction, I can be taken into someone else's reality, opening doors into their innermost experiences."

A follow-up to this first link is planned for September. In between the conferences, pupils will exchange e-mails and digital images to help them explore the two communities separated by the entire Atlantic ocean, directly onto which both Robben Island and Ilfracombe College look out.