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The Start of a Life-Long Friendship
Continued from the front page
The nonprofit peace camp gives the girls opportunities to live a few weeks away from violence, and to have a safe place where they can openly express to each other their emotions and stories, many of which include tales of the loss of friends or family members as a result of the region's conflicts.
"The camp is beautiful-a place where we can come together and exchange stories about the suffering that we are going through, but It's not all pretty," Eden, a 16-year-old Israeli camper said. "Sometime there are fights. It gets very frustrating."
Farah, a 17-year-old camper from Palestine said despite the frustration, campers have to put aside their differences and when that happens, friendships blossom.
"We all live here," she said. "We can't afford to hold a grudge. Sometimes we may strongly disagree with each other and that all comes out in the dialog room or in the art we create. As the days go by we find that we can really share our experiences and grow towards peace and even friendship." |
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This year the camp also hosted a few events that were open to PeacePal members, and over the course of a week 14 new friendships were forged between American, Israeli, and Palestinian PeacePals.
"It is absolutely amazing that these girls got to meet with each other face-to-face," Project PeacePal Founder Sarah Wilkinson said. "This is something that is very rare and very special. Our PeacePals are separated by thousands and thousands of miles, and often war, and a lack of roads or phones-everything we take for granted here, or by crushing poverty. They almost never get to meet. When they met each other for the first time you could see friendships developing almost instantaneously."
Alex, of Albuquerque and Shirit, of Israel just met and are looking forward to continuing their friendship through PeacePal.
"It's really exciting to meet the person you're writing to," Alex said. "I really want to gain a new perspective about the area and be a good friend as well."
Shirit said working for peace has become personal and sees PeacePal as a means to help accomplish that.
"I come from a place that is close to war," she said. "We live with it every day and it's important to me to be able to get my views across-to share what I'm going through."
Wilkinson said the partnership between the two peace organizations occurred serendipitously in January because of adjoining booths at a peace event.
"When they found out about our program they saw it as an opportunity for their campers to meet and correspond with some of our participants," she said. "We have a network of people looking for PeacePals and we also have a need to expand our program in the Middle East."
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