Our Children and a Summer of Peacemaking

Last Christmas season, the words “peace on Earth” on greeting cards was very striking to me.  “But where is the peace?” I wondered with all of the city’s street violence and the ravages of two wars in the Middle East.  At St. Frances Academy one morning, we all wondered at a faculty-staff meeting what the impact was of so much inhumanity being inflicted.  We decided that it had to be adversely affecting our children and that as educators we had to do something about it in the spirit of Mother Mary Lange and the Oblate Sisters of Providence.  So, we incorporated the peace messages in activities at the high school this year: the MLK Job Fair, Career Day, etc. and when Ms. Nawal Rajeh, my Jesuit Volunteer Assistant, asked me if we could have a Peace Camp this summer for our elementary school age kids, I said “sure”.  

She had worked in Youngstown, Ohio with another group of nuns, the Sisters of St. Joseph in Baden, Pennsylvania, who founded the Peace Camp concept and had been running them in various places for the past several years.  She connected me with Sister Anna Marie Gaglia, who provided us some funding and secured us training with Jim McGinnis of the Institute for Justice and Peace in St. Louis.  We imported three senior counselors for the camp: Patrick Hagan from Notre Dame in South Bend and Michael Gonsales and Emma Skinner from Ohio Dominican University.   Baltimoreans, Marc Boles and Nia Moore, also, were camp counselors.  

On the afternoon of the first day of the camp, once the children had gone home, our summer camp coordinator, Ms. Iyana Wakefield, stopped by my office to inform me the peace camp idea could never work.  She was afraid we did not have enough material to conduct a peace camp for six weeks.  The counselors are too inexperienced, the children need discipline and you (meaning me) might need your head examined, she suggested. Besides, this was very different from the literacy camp we had been conducting.  

But peace prevailed.  We met and formatted a six week camp (prior peace camps were no more [than two] weeks long and none had been run for inner city Black children in 3rd, 4th and 5th or other grades as far as we could detect).  We decided to select six “peace heroes” to study one for each week of the camp: Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai (the least known—a 2004 Nobel Peace winning environmentalist from Kenya) and Martin Luther King.  And we honored a different value each day: Mondays: respect, Tuesdays: communication, Wednesdays: forgiveness and courage, Thursdays: respect for nature and each Friday was a field trip day to somewhere educational and /or fun.  

We provided breakfast and lunch, as well as lots of snacks.  And in addition to the morning lessons in peacemaking, we provided afternoon swimming, gym play and alternating music and arts and crafts classes.    We received the valuable assistance of two very strong professional peacemaking organizations: the American Friends Services Committee and the Community Mediation Program.  They played games with them and taught the 35 children techniques in non-violence including communicating, anger management and the value of peace.  We brought in an instructor to teach Tai Chi, the slow motion martial art form to help individuals center themselves and we took the children to meet some Missionaries of Charity Sisters (Mother Theresa’s order).  We exposed them to alternate ways of thinking about things. We hope we planted peace flowers in them.  Many of the children have already begun talking with their families about what they’ve learned.  That is what we expected of our new peacemakers.   

In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught, “Blessed are the peacemakers. They shall be called the children of God”.  May our children be twice blessed and may peace begin with them.    

Ralph E. Moore, Jr.
Community Center Director
St. Frances Academy

This article appeared in The Catholic Review on August 23, 2007 under the title "Planting seeds of peace in children"