BY DESDA MOSS | Under ordinary circumstances, the 450 teens attending a special summer camp in Otisfield, Maine, would be the bitterest of enemies. After all, in the international communities that these teens come from, conflict has been the norm for many generations. But for a few weeks this summer, between basketball and soccer, swimming and sailing, these young people will see a side of their fellow campers they don’t often experience in their own strife-torn worlds: their human side.
“The so-called enemy has a face,” says Aaron Miller, a former State Department employee who is president of Seeds of Peace, the non-profit that runs the camp.
Seeds, founded in 1993 to foster ties among young people from the Middle East, has since been expanded to include teens from Cyprus, the Balkans, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Despite its serene lakeside setting and typical camp activities, the camp isn’t all fun and games. Students must attend daily 90-minute sessions with a facilitator trained in conflict resolution who elicits painful feelings and prejudices.
“I call them detox sessions because they bring out some of the worst kind of venom,” Miller says. “They’re intense, and they’re volatile.”
We could all use a dose of such emotional detox, regardless of where we live. Imagine spending time each day examining the habits and behaviors—our own and others’—that break our peace, then working to find ways, large and small, to restore it. You need only consider the recent killings at the Lockheed Martin plant in Mississippi and the high school murder plot in New Jersey to see an abiding truth about human nature: Hurt people hurt people.
I recently volunteered at a Peace Camp in Virginia directed by M.J. Park, an educator who developed a program to teach young children problem-solving skills. I was amazed at the kids’ abilities to describe what peace means to them and to share their concerns about conflicts that affect their lives, from fights with siblings to worries about military action in Iraq.
“Peace: We can’t live without it,” Jasmine Porter, 9, of Washington, D.C., wrote in a poem. How well we adults nurture that capacity to coexist in Porter and other children may give the world its best shot at survival.
Desda Moss is a Virginia-based writer.