The topic of "peace” has a long history within SOS Children’s Villages: Hermann Gmeiner promoted the interrelation between peace and SOS Children’s Villages on several occasions and it was with good reason that he called the first family house in Imst "House of Peace".
Actually, a lot of the work of SOS Children’s Villages can be defined as peace work or peace education, since one major objective of SOS Children's Villages' work is to help children and young people to find inner peace – which is a basic precondition to interact peacefully with others.
Children participate in planning and organising the project
The "Peace Project Caldonazzo" aims to give some clarity as to what matters to children concerning the subject of "peace”. Since a participative approach had been chosen, it only stood to reason that children were involved in the
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| Photo: Benno Neeleman |
project right from the start and contributed a lot to the development of the project with their ideas and suggestions.
The first step was a "steering group" meeting between three young people from the SOS Children’s Village in Imst and three staff members of the General Secretariat. At the meeting, ideas were collected on how children might playfully present the subject "Peace”. These ideas were put into practice at the SOS summer camp Caldonazzo from 22 to 24 July, 2008.
Workshop as a starting point
The starting point was a workshop on 22 July, which focused on three topics: interculturality, participation and peace. Village Directors and educational staff members had come from Austria, Germany, Latvia, Hungary and Poland. Aside from theoretical input on the different topics, exchanges among the colleagues were the main focus of the impulse day: How and when do we experience interculturality in our work? What experiences have we had with the subject of participation, what does successful participation require? What does "peace” mean to us as individuals, how can we contribute to enabling ourselves and, more importantly, the children in our care to live at peace with themselves and the world?
During the last part of the workshop, Tatjana, a young girl from the SOS Children’s Village in Imst and a member of the "Peace Project Caldonazzo” steering group, and Sonja, also from the SOS Children’s Village in Imst, discussed possible ways of implementing the peace project with the participants over the following two days of the workshop.
Handicrafts, paintings and drums… for peace
Over the two days that followed, the "creative tents" of the summer camp focussed on peace. Here is a small selection the many interesting activities:
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| The "longest peace road in Europe" - Photo: Benno Neeleman |
The children drew the "longest peace road in Europe” in chalk right across the camp, they drew and crafted symbols of peace, manufactured peace lights in the form of little wooden boats, created a peace dance to the new SOS song "Here I am”, made a "peace map” and much, much more. The children presented the results on the evening of 24 July at a big celebration that they themselves had helped to plan and put together.
So what does "peace” mean to the children? Some said "no war", others said "less quarrelling”, some mentioned "friendship".