On Thursday and Friday, students from the Model United Nations (MUN) club organized its fourth annual MUN conference: NELMUN 2020! Due to the coronavirus situation, the conference was held online, with delegates taking part from home and our chairs working from school. 

Although smaller than usual, NELMUN 2020 had delegates from the Dreilinden Gymnasium, the Katholische Schule Liebfrauen and NMS working together to solve issues under the banner topic of “Creating Global Solutions for Global Problems”. The 35 delegates worked in two committees, with the Security Council debating the issue of “Human rights violations in North Korea” and the Human Rights Committee discussing “Governmental vs Civil Liberty: Maintaining a balance between data protection and civil security in times of crisis”. 

The Senat has published a number of English and German info sheets regarding important topics. Here are a few items that were recently recommended to the webteam and requested. 

• If my child falls ill Infografik (Senat PDF download)
• Corona Stufenplan (Senat German PDF download)
• Compulsory measles vaccination requirement (Senat word download) and also related DW article

Our team of students, Anneke Linh Bussert, Martha Bulkuley, Charlotte Braune, Katharina Sharma all presently in Q1 participated in the Green Cities project on sustainability: Green Urban Environments GRUEN  hosted by the HongKong Baptist Unversity (HKBU). This was a project that was designed to be an online collaboration between school pupils geographically separated and the resulting models were to be presented face to face in Hong Kong. The project was funded by the EU Erasmus+.

The class lists were one of the vital channels used by the school and GEV to communicate changes to whole school years at extremely short notice during the corona crisis and more recently, the organisational changes to the parent evenings. Sign up for the lists is quite critical. Even if you were registered last year, it does not automatically move to a new class; you need to re-register.

Please don't get caught out, don't miss out on information from the school and the Parents Council! A number of parents have still not remembered to sign up for the lists for the new classes.

Sign up for the class email list here: https://forms.gle/nqEb1a3oF2ZrXxqx5

Thanks to all those who have already signed up to the Doodle list. 2nd October is the deadline for country choices. There's still time to play your part in building our school community! 

​**Dear Raffle Captains: We would ideally like to have a nice photograph and a list of contents for each basket by 30th October, to enable us to promote them during ticket sale time in November** When your basket is ready, please send these details to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Dear Festival Fans! 

This Saturday would likely have been the date for our Festival of Nations, the school year's biggest fundraiser, and the opportunity for us to get together and party as a whole community. We, the FoN committee members, are especially saddened that Covid has spoiled plans to celebrate our school in its historic 20th anniversary year. However, we now have a plan to bring us together in a common cause, and try to recoup some of the losses that festival cancellation means...

The Gift Basket Raffle is one of the most anticipated parts of the festival. This year we want to GO BIG. We would like each class in the school to create a gift basket for a grand raffle, which will be held in December (date to be confirmed). 

The appalling attacks in Paris on the 13th of November 2015 elicited an enormous response from our school, the recent devastating explosion in Beirut almost none. We as an international school must show solidarity to all peoples. In this light, the fundraising action undertaken by our Lebanese pupil Sina and her colleagues is all the more important to mark in Buzz in our fight against injustice and discrimination at the NMS. Please read her report below.
David Brown

On the 4th of August 2020, an explosion ripped through the Lebanese capital city, Beirut. The cause of the explosion was 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in the port without any safety measures. Who is to blame? A negligent government that cares about money more than human lives. The result: 180 deaths, 300 000 people displaced. I am the daughter of Lebanese parents and have been emotionally and mentally strained by the Beirut Port Explosions. 

The Nelson Mandela School is part of the programme "Cultural Agents for Creative Schools". The cultural agent, Katharina Stahlhoven, the artist, Thomas Wienands and Detlef Wingerath came up with a project before the holidays as part of the project "Urban Botany III: Places of Community Creation /Subproject: GartenVersuchsFeld, Nelson Mandela School", which was to be implemented directly in the first week of school.

Let's stick together.  Let's keep NMS a good place for our kids!!

Dear all, some parents have asked what the Friends are about and how we help the school.  

What do Friends stand for:
We stand for community. We stand for each and every child at our school. We stand for financial and community support. We stand for you.

Who we are:
The Friends are the Förderverein of NMS. We are volunteers from within the community, parents, teachers and donors who dedicate time and money, to support our school and children when regular school funds are not enough. With the beginning of this school year, we have about 350 members, which is only ONE THIRD of families. All children benefit, and so if you are not contributing and you are able, please play your part. If you cannot support financially, can you help with time and energy?

What we do: 

Hello, musical students wanted!

Welcome to the new school year 2020/21.

The NMS orchestra is now trying a comeback. The practice sessions are now in sections.

If you are interested in playing within our group  - then, come, see and join us. We look forward to seeing you!

Practice: Thursdays 3:05-4:40 P30, Music Department

 We were recently sent a very cool music video by NMS' Kamil Ahmad, who is 16 and a Q1 student. This video has some been given some serious work and love; it even has drone footage. We showed it to a few people, and they loved it. Check it out, enjoy it and if you like it then give him a thumbs up and think about subscribing to his Youtube channel where he can be found under the name AKAY. Video: Corona Times here on youtube

Kamil told us: "I wrote a song about the Covid-19 pandemic and my personal experiences in the last couple of months. Hopefully I can use this song to spread some positive and uplifting vibes in these complicated times and motivate the NMS community for the new school year. "

NMS student Loy Popp  was interviewed in June during the Black Lives Matter protests in Berlin by DAZED. His image appeared widely on social media around the world. He talked about various issues, including the experience of living in Germany as a black person.

Loy is now in grade 13, and taking the Abi Q3. See the video of Loy on Youtube here.

We reached out to Loy for a comment and he had this to say: "While my brother and I were moving through the crowd of the Black Lives Matter protest a lady approached us and asked if we wanted to take part in an interview. She briefly gave us some questions to guide our discussion, but they slipped my mind as soon as she held out her microphone. However, when she said go, it was as if the frustration that has been building up within me for the past 19 years could finally be released, and the words came to me...

In spring, the WirBerlin initiative invited submissions for a poster competition on the topic “keep our waters clean” that received more than 900 entries.

Two of NMS‘ former 4th graders, Esther and Siri, had their posters selected for the 36 finalists that are currently shown on the scaffolding at Rathaus Tiergarten.