Vin­ode Mam­chan

While many par­ents in T&T are stress­ing over the fact that their chil­dren have SEA to write and that they should not take part in ex­tra-cur­ric­u­lar ac­tiv­i­ties, young archer Kirese Ma­haraj has ap­peared on the scene to show them dif­fer­ent­ly.

The 'A' stu­dent at TML Pri­ma­ry School in San Fer­nan­do has been very busy on and off the field mak­ing waves and demon­strat­ing that both aca­d­e­mics and the sport go hand in hand.

Her par­ents Kim­dath and Di­anne Ma­haraj have been very sup­port­ive of her ex­ploits and they re­cent­ly saw her emerged as the top stu­dent in the San­fest Sto­ry­telling cat­e­go­ry, while at the same time, train­ing hard for an up­com­ing archery tour­na­ment and main­tain­ing her 'A' sta­tus in the class­room.

While do­ing all of this Kirese was able to come away as the top stu­dent at San­fest, walk­ing away with two tro­phies for two cat­e­gories she won as well as an­oth­er for the most out­stand­ing per­former over­all.

The South­ern Bowtech Acad­e­my stu­dent won first place in the sto­ry­telling, made it to the fi­nals of the verse speak­ing, got a bronze medal in pub­lic speak­ing, an­oth­er bronze for play­ing an in­stru­ment so­lo and a sil­ver for per­form­ing a clas­si­cal In­di­an dance in the mod­ern dance cat­e­go­ry.

Speak­ing to T&T Guardian the grade four stu­dent who is al­so an avid swim­mer said :"I al­ways re­main fo­cus on what I want to do and in the end I am able to achieve it. Ever since I was small I al­ways liked to do many things and was able to chan­nel my en­er­gies in­to pos­i­tive ac­tiv­i­ties.

"When I am at home I fo­cus on get­ting my stud­ies out of the way and then I put great ef­fort on all the oth­er as­pects of my life." The young­ster was al­so high in praise of her par­ents say­ing that they are al­ways right there with her giv­ing all the sup­port nec­es­sary.

"My par­ents have been giv­ing me all the en­cour­age­ment and this is im­por­tant be­cause they are like my coach­es. They are al­ways there of­fer­ing words of ad­vice and com­fort and this has paved the way for me so far.

"I want to con­tin­ue ex­celling in all fields in or­der to make them proud and I am not afraid of all the hard work to come."