All The Way To Maine

ALL THE WAY TO MAINE
A report on the Seeds of Peace Camp
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Arifa Habib (delegation leader: Pakistan)
Dilip D’Souza (delegation leader: India)


Young boys and girls swarming down a gravel path, talking in excited voices, laughing at each others’ jokes. A canoe, a sailboat and a motor-boat on a beautiful tree-surrounded lake, all manned by young people with adults in charge. Pine wood cabins with towels and T-shirts hanging out to dry. An energetic game of street hockey over in that corner.

A typical Maine summer camp for rich American kids?

No. Very few of the teenagers at this camp are American. They come from Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Pakistan; certainly many could never be called "rich"; and English, the language they use, is not their mother tongue. This is a summer camp with a difference, a global difference, I should say. The Seeds of Peace Camp for Conflict Resolution in Otisfield, Maine, is where young people (ages 13 - 16) from regions of conflict live, eat, sleep and play together. They work on projects together and are challenged to form friendships with the "enemy".

Here they meet the "enemy", perhaps for the first time in their lives, in neutral surroundings alien to both. They are given the chance not only to express their views and feelings to the other side in a safe environment, without fear of retaliation; but are also taught to listen to the opposing side. They realize through all this that "the enemy has a face", in the words of the founder of Seeds of Peace, the late John Wallach. "We are trying to humanize conflicts that have been deliberately dehumanized by governments intent on perpetrating them," he said in a message to the camp staff before he passed away this summer.

Conflict is a human condition. We feel it as a destructive, crushing force. We experience it every day even if we don’t live in regions in the midst of war. But we can use conflict situations positively. That is the SoP philosophy. To work with young people living in the most violent war zones, the most bitter conflicts, and equip them with the strength to rise above the hatred of their "enemy"; to see "the enemy" as a human being with loves, hopes, fears and aspirations like ourselves; to bring peace to the hearts of people so they might then see it on the ground. For peace is not only an absence of conflict, it is a state of mind and heart where one does not carry hatred and the memory of wrongs sustained. How can one be at peace if one is thirsting for revenge? I might add here that thirsting for revenge and aspiring for justice are two separate things. Peace and justice involve many complicated issues, and Seeds of Peace does not shirk from tackling them head on.


"We are not about planting a tree or clasping hands and singing a song and calling it peace", John Wallach once wrote. "We are precisely the opposite. We don’t brush anything under the rug. We believe that only by opening up wounds of past prejudices and hatreds can they be healed." And it is a tribute to the Seeds of Peace experience that that is just how the kids come to feel by the end of camp. "As far as the situation between India and Pakistan is concerned, we do not make a difference," says Wasif Munir of Pakistan. "But we have got to know a lot -- Indian views, their concerns; that our history texts are not always reliable and so it’s difficult to judge what really happened."

Wasif has his finger on something else: in daily governmental dealings, it is certainly true that these kids, and all they learn about each other, do not figure. "No one is suggesting that youth exchange is going to end a war or conflict," says Susan C. Hovanec of the South Asian Bureau of the U.S. State Department, which has closely watched the Seeds of Peace experiment.

"So what’s the point of the camp?" one might ask.

"Politicians make peace," said Wallach, "but if the two peoples concerned harbour bitter feelings against each other, then true peace has not been achieved." So at the SoP camp, children are one step ahead of their leaders and are forging friendships across borders. That is the point.

Colour games is one of the most exciting events at camp. It is a two-day programme held at the end, in which the entire camp is divided into two teams, the blue and the green. The teams are formed irrespective of nationality and they compete in a series of activities and team sports (the activities and games include everything from art projects to relay swimming). Each event has a certain point value and the team with the highest number of points at the end wins. The competition is fierce, but good sportsmanship is maintained at all times. The "prize" of the winning team is not money, food or special privileges, but that they get to jump in the lake fully clothed; the losing team follows right after. The event thus culminates in a water fight that eases all the tensions of competition.

What is significant about the colour games is that the team-mate you depend on to win is often from "the other side" and that you may be competing against your countryman with the help of your "enemy". The encouraging thing is that none of the kids seemed to find this at all strange.

So if these young people are making friends with "the enemy", aren’t they traitors to their countries, to their religions, to the causes that their fathers have died for? Well, if you want peace for your country, are you betraying it?

Does wanting to practice one’s faith freely, out of the shadow of guns, make one an apostate? Did their fathers not die to give them peace?

"Before I came here I was worried that if I eat on the same table as an Indian or an Israeli the people of my country would consider me a traitor," says Shezray Naqshband of Pakistan. She found her own resolution of that particular dilemma: "But Allah is pleased with peacemakers." Akshaya Shankar from India also got to thinking about ideas of patriotism: "This patriotism hinders coexistence," she said. How many of us, in either country, would be willing to admit that what passes for patriotism has prevented our peoples from living in peace?

How does one take young people from two conflicting nations, brought up to hate and distrust each other, and get them to form bonds, to make friends?

How do these young people come to realize that "the enemy is just like me", as Fahad Ali Kazmi of Pakistan put it? Through the games, the projects, the meetings with the campers from their conflict region (called coexistence sessions) during which the dispute is critically reflected on via discussions, story telling and drama. Coexistence sessions are held with trained facilitators, whose role is not to impose values or opinions, nor to set the historical record straight; but to foster learning, listening, to ask questions that will encourage the young people to make their own choices. Hassan Raza of Pakistan explained: "I learnt not to emphasize history as the heroes in our history books are portrayed as the villains in theirs and vice versa. We carry our past into our future. But it is the future which is important, not the past. We shouldn’t waste our time on fruitlessly discussing the past - this only results in hatred. Both sides have made mistakes, we need to move on towards solutions, towards a better future."

Listening to these children speak about the bonds they have forged, you understand: these are not relationships in which contentious issues are carefully avoided. They are forged after discussing everything openly, learning to listen to and see the other person’s point of view even if it is not shared. That is the foundation of their strength, and that is why they offer hope for peace.

Most of the leaders of India and Pakistan spread the message of hatred and intolerance. They seem unable to think of the other country except in those terms. They need to note that these young people have lived together, talked out their disputes, reached an understanding and are willing to work together to build a brighter future for themselves. "We finally realized," said Madhumita Venkataramanan of India, "that we actually understood each other’s fears. We might not accept them, or agree with them, but we understood them, and we knew what they feared, and they began to understand us."

You hear sentiments like that and you cannot help asking the question: what’s a better route to the peace we all yearn for in our part of the world? The suspicion and hatred and mistrust we feel for our neighbours, that we have lived with for 55 years? Or the understanding that Madhumita and Shezray, Hassan and Akshaya, found in Maine?

You also cannot help asking the question: why did they have to go all the way to Maine?