Peace Week
Oct. 12th, 2005 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
franceslievensLast week in one of the schools I work in (I'm working in three different schools at the moment) we did a peace project with the kids. They thought it cool, not being divided between the different teachers and working together, listening to stories, getting to watch a film. I learned to know the kids that aren't in my classes and slightly wrecked my voice, being the only teacher that can yell over 44 talking pupils. I really shouldn't do that.
Unfortunately the idea behind the week went a bit over their heads. They are aware peace is important. They are awarre there's war out there, small and big, but they don't get what it is to live in constant war, to not know what peace is. Therefore my pupils don't know what peace is. How can you know what peace is if you have never seen the opposite?
We teachers aren't much better. I didn't really know what I had to tell the children, what I had to show them. We take our peace for granted, don't we? Our quiet, our schools, our jobs... It's so normal. Then I saw a documentary on Sunday about the civil war in Liberia. Two journalists on two sides of the front line in the summer of 2003: one in the capital Monrovia, waiting for the war to get there, and one moving towards Monrovia with the rebels. You see civilians begging for international troops to bring order in the chaos. You see teenagers with guns, wearing flipflops in the battle. "How old were you when you started fighting?" asks the reporter. "Seven." "And how old are you now?" "Seventeen." These kids think of their leader as their father. Serving their country in this harsh way is their only goal in life. They don't know what peace is, because they haven't seen it. Neither do they know what war is. It's their daily life.
I watched the documentary and thought it was simply this that the kids should know: that there are other kids out there that don't know there is something else then grenades, dodging bullets and killing others to stay alive. My pupils got angry with each other because one messed up the other's painting. A little war that's easily put right, but how do you fix the lives of (tens of) thousands of children for whom shooting grenades is every day life, and not drawing pictures of rainbows and writing peace on it?
Unfortunately the idea behind the week went a bit over their heads. They are aware peace is important. They are awarre there's war out there, small and big, but they don't get what it is to live in constant war, to not know what peace is. Therefore my pupils don't know what peace is. How can you know what peace is if you have never seen the opposite?
We teachers aren't much better. I didn't really know what I had to tell the children, what I had to show them. We take our peace for granted, don't we? Our quiet, our schools, our jobs... It's so normal. Then I saw a documentary on Sunday about the civil war in Liberia. Two journalists on two sides of the front line in the summer of 2003: one in the capital Monrovia, waiting for the war to get there, and one moving towards Monrovia with the rebels. You see civilians begging for international troops to bring order in the chaos. You see teenagers with guns, wearing flipflops in the battle. "How old were you when you started fighting?" asks the reporter. "Seven." "And how old are you now?" "Seventeen." These kids think of their leader as their father. Serving their country in this harsh way is their only goal in life. They don't know what peace is, because they haven't seen it. Neither do they know what war is. It's their daily life.
I watched the documentary and thought it was simply this that the kids should know: that there are other kids out there that don't know there is something else then grenades, dodging bullets and killing others to stay alive. My pupils got angry with each other because one messed up the other's painting. A little war that's easily put right, but how do you fix the lives of (tens of) thousands of children for whom shooting grenades is every day life, and not drawing pictures of rainbows and writing peace on it?
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 09:48 am (UTC)Have you seen "Darwin's Nightmare"? One of the most horrible thing was that guy who guarded the fish factory with his arc and wished that war would occur because it meant a soldier's pay...
What can we do when adults long for war? What can we do when war is considered as better than peace?
no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 11:33 am (UTC)I haven't Darwin's Nightmare. Haven't heard of it either. Maybe I should check it out.
What can we do when adults long for war?
It's a question kids that are a bit older sometimes ask. What can we do in a world that's too big for us? So you try to let them have peace amongst each other, because sometimes they are tiny adults. Like that one boy who started hitting another kid because that kid had yelled "Ta mère!" at him. I told him that wasn't the way we solve things. He simply yelled at me: "Why does he say such a thing?" and ran off. What do we do when little kids make war?
Maybe the problem I had wasn't so much them not knowing or understanding the devastation of war, but more us teachers not being able to communicate the importance and fragility of peace. It's so easy to say "peace is necessary", but it's not easy to show that peace starts in their own little worlds.
Or maybe I just ask too much of the little ones. :-)
no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 11:42 am (UTC)It's a must-see, but it's really hard.
It's about Tanzania and how people live near Victoria Lake...
About Darwin's Nightmare
no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 11:46 am (UTC)But as Merlin said in "Excalibur"..."men's fate is to forget"
no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 12:26 pm (UTC)Pfft, why do you think I write, because I am prone to forget. It is making my memory.
But again, it's making. I remember what I have written, but not what I have read...