Students getting acquainted while in U.S.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS | They see themselves as fledgling ambassadors who can help solidify the shaky beginnings of peace in the Middle East.
About 200 Israeli, Egyptians, Moroccan, Palestinian and Jordanian youths ages 12 to 18 arrived in Boston late Wednesday to begin a four-week adventure of getting to know each other through the Seeds of Peace program.
The program includes a two-week stay at a camp in Oxford, Maine.
Shadi, an 18-year-old from Jordan, which decided only Saturday to send a delegation, sees himself as a token of the new peace between his country and Israel.
“When we are together … talking together, playing together, eating together, that will improve the peace,” Shadi said Thursday while attending a meeting at Harvard University. “We can make a small peace which grows into a big peace with our two governments.”
Tal, a 14-year-old Israeli girl from Jerusalem, thinks the program is a modest beginning.
“I don’t think it will have a big effect overall, but for us we’ll feel different having met Moroccan children,” she said.
Seeds of Peace was founded by John Wallach, foreign editor for Hearst Newspapers and author of three books on the Middle East, after the Feb. 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center in New York by Muslim extremists. It is funded by private contributors and corporations. For security reasons, officials refused to allow the students’ last names to be used.
Participants are selected by their governments for their leadership qualities and their ability to speak English, program officials said. Next year, Seeds of Peace organizers hope to include children from Syria and Lebanon as well.
In Boston, the young people will attend a Patriots game, visit the New England Aquarium and the Museum of Science, and go to barbecues and other social events. They are staying at a Tufts University dormitory.
But the real work begins Monday when they go to Camp Powhatan, where they will play sports, do art projects and sit down for a daily rap session to talk about their fears and hopes, their differences and similarities. The camp, which lasts two weeks, is the heart of the program, organizers said.
Then they will go to Washington for a week for more sightseeing and meetings with elected officials.
“In the process of becoming friends with the other people, they meet prejudices head on,” said Bobbie Gottschalk, executive director of Seeds of Peace.
Barak, a 15-year-old Israeli boy from Jerusalem who came last summer also, said he is still in touch with many of the other teen-agers he met last year,
“I don’t care if they’re Palestinian or from the Gaza Strip. This is like turning a whole new page,” he said. “It may not make a difference to the whole world, but it will to my friends and their friends and their friends. I know I’ve changed a couple of people to think straight instead of crooked.”