Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Kids4Peace Vermont Envisions a Better Future for the Middle East

By Cindy Hill

And if their plowshares beat their swords

They shall be shattered with war no more

And everyone beneath the vine and fig tree

Shall live in peace and unafraid.

            --lyrics, traditional Middle Eastern song

In spring 2009, Diane Nancekivell found herself sitting in Jerusalem looking at pictures of a green summertime in Vermont, in a scrapbook put together by a middle-school-aged Muslim girl. The photos and memorabilia were labeled in both Arabic and English.

“She was showing it to us and her younger brothers were hanging over her, looking at the pictures with us, and that to me said so much,” Nancekivell recalls. The retired Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral in Trenton, New Jersey who is now affiliated with the Burlington Episcopal Cathedral and serves as president of Kids4Peace Vermont, Nancekivell had been yearning for just such moments—in which the hope that the seed of peace (planted in the 11-13-year-old Muslim, Christian, and Jewish children from Palestine and Israel who join together for a two-week summer camp in Vermont each year) may thrive and grow in the rocky soil of Middle Eastern relations.

Vermont Episcopal Bishop Thomas Ely, a founder of the Vermont chapter of Kids4Peace, attributes the success of the program to the families who make it happen. Nancekivell believes the courage of the parents who send their children to Kids4Peace is the fuel that can set peace alight.

“They risk so much in sending their kids across the ocean – many of the parents have not ever been on a plane, and to allow their children to get on a plane and go so far away at that age, that takes enormous courage,” Nancekivell says. “The parents hope that their children don’t grow up with hatred in their hearts.”

Spiritual Traditions and S’mores

Kids4Peace USA was founded in 2002 in Atlanta, Georgia, as an interfaith initiative to create young peacemakers amongst children of the three Abrahamic religious traditions residing in Israel and Palestine—the “people of the Book,” Muslims, Christians and Jews. These three faiths collectively account for over half the world’s population. All three count Abraham as a revered father of their religion, and all three value Jerusalem and other locations in the region of Israel and Palestine as sacred sites at which key events in occurred in the foundation of their faiths.

Yet the heartland of their spiritual institutions is marked as much by war as love, fear as well as faith. “They are standing in checkpoints, been in wars, been living with soldiers all around,” says Ronen Schechner, who moved to Vermont from Tel Aviv with his family just a few years ago and is now co-director of the Kids4 Peace Vermont camp. “They have a wounded soul. We are trying to help heal that wounded soul.”

That healing starts with some simple introductions. The Kids4Peace Vermont summer camp was founded in 2008. Each summer, the program invites in 24 campers, a mix of boys and girls ages 11-13. Of these, 12 are from Vermont and 12 from Jerusalem and the West Bank. Both groups include four campers from each of the three faiths. Many of the children involved in Kids4Peace have not even met a person of a faith other than their own, Nancekivell says. “Ignorance is at the foundation of enmity, and if only could find ways to meet one another and find meaning together, we’d respect it,” she says. “My experience is the deeper your faith, the more you understand that other faiths are also deep, and the more you can accept that.”

Kids4Peace does not proselytize, nor do they specifically discuss the current political situation in Palestine and Israel, but the program does foster learning about all three religions involved in the program. The children visit a church (the Episcopal cathedral in Burlington), a mosque (the Islamic Society of Vermont in Colchester), and a synagogue (Ohavi Zedek, also in Burlington).

“They sit quietly or participate, it’s up to them,” Nancekivell says. “We had 150 people at Sunday service at the cathedral this year. It was the most poignant moment this summer, to see 30-plus non-Christians sit in respectful observation for over an hour during the service, it was deeply moving. For weeks thereafter the people at the cathedral were talking about it. There’s a vulnerability and authenticity of people at prayer, no matter where they are. We are getting to an authentic respect for others.”

Interfaith understanding is fostered daily at the Kids4Peace camp, with activities such as a table laden with symbolic objects from all three religions. Each day a camper selects an object, which may be one she’s familiar with from her own religion, or one she knows nothing about from another religion. Throughout the day, the campers talk about it, explaining what the item is and how it’s used, while all the kids seek similarities between that item and objects used in their own religious practices. At the end of the camp, the kids pull all their newfound knowledge together in a theatrical production called the Abrahamic Tent, in which they write their own scripts to perform narratives from each of the three religious traditions.

But the camp is not all spiritual introspection. While the campers hone their peacemaking skills in the morning with team-building exercises like pairing up with a partner to make plaster-of-paris masks of their own faces, they spend the afternoon swimming, hiking, biking, boating, and engaging in all the usual fun of Vermont summer camp. That in itself is a welcome break from the strife of their homelands. “The kids there don’t play outside much,” Nancekivell says. “It’s not safe.”

“The biggest asset in Vermont is nature,” Schechner adds. “That is something we have to give those kids especially from Israel and Palestine because they don’t have that. Through nature you can learn about yourself.” Days at Kids4Peace camp in Vermont end with a bonfire, singing, roasted potatoes and Kosher s’mores.

Ben and Jerry’s ice cream is also a hit. Ben Cohen himself came to the camp and doled out scoops this past summer, staying to chat with the kids. The story of the Jewish kid from New York turned global socially-responsibly ice-cream maker is well known in Jerusalem. “He’s like a rock star to them,” Nancekivell says.

Food and Families

Providing Kosher and Halal food that all the campers can, and will, eat has been just one of the many points on the learning curve for the Vermont camp coordinators. Food and hospitality are critical elements of Middle Eastern culture. Meals are frequently vegetarian to accommodate the widest range of dietary practices.

The Vermont camp moved this year to the comfortable environs of the Bishop Booth Conference Center in Burlington. “We had underestimated the degree to which hospitality is such a shared value of Middle Eastern culture,” Nancekivell explains.  “Our rustic northern camps that we had chosen in the past really were not acceptable. And this year, the Jerusalem kids came in 36 hours ahead of the American kids, so the Jerusalem kids felt more like the hosts when the Vermont kids arrived. The Episcopal Bishop lives on the property and we went to his house one of those first nights, he hosted a Middle Eastern dinner. So they were in a private home and eating foods they were familiar with, and that helped everyone feel more comfortable and welcome.”

The camp is run primarily in English, a language which some of the children may be familiar with from home, but which most learn in the 10 meetings which occur at the Anglican Center in East Jerusalem before making the trip to Vermont.

“The parents come there to the meetings as well,” Nancekivell says. “A number of the parents have become friends and visit each other’s homes, so we see the ripple effect.” That ripple effect spreads outward through the huge extended families that are integral to Middle Eastern culture.  “We don’t have the same kind of appreciation for extended families. There, there are 30-40 people of many generations when they go home. So the kids talk with every one of those folks and have to deal with their reactions.”

The kids also face their communities at large when they return home. They have to decide whether or not to wear their Kids4Peace t-shirts to school, “an enormous risk that they talk about,” Nancekivell says.

The campers are also obligated to participate in three post-camp meetings in East Jerusalem. These meetings help them plan strategies for staying in touch with the friends they made in camp as well as taking their new perspective out into the community. Last year they took an art project they’d learned in camp to an orphanage in Jerusalem and shared it with the kids there.

Follow-Up Peace

Kids4Peace is evolving as program administrators and camp coordinators learn what works and how to strengthen the experience both at camp and upon the campers’ return home. The campers are selected mainly on recommendations from their teachers, who identify kids who are potential leaders, with an inclination towards adventure and exploring the possibility of a wider world. The organization helps contribute to the staff in Jerusalem and pays all the costs of the airfare, insurance, and the cost of running the camp in Vermont. This year for the first time the parents in Jerusalem did pay a tuition fee of $500, which stayed in Jerusalem to help fund their overhead for the year of meetings before and after the camps, and sorting through the applications to select campers.

Parents of Vermont campers also pay a token tuition to help underwrite the program, but the fee remains considerably less than that of any comparable 10-day summer camp. The Vermont program to date lacks a major sponsor, though the generosity of Ben and Jerry’s as well as the ECHO center and the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory greatly enhanced the quality of the program.

Kids4Peace Vermont will be running its first alumni leadership camp in Southern Vermont next summer, with 15-16 year olds. They also hope to do a camp in Israel, send 15-16 year old alums from Vermont to Israel, then bringing the 18-19 year olds back to Vermont two years later.

What do the kids get out of it? “One said he was afraid of Jews before he came, and said now I know they are the same as me,” Nancekivell says. “They grow in confidence, in part just from the trip.” Her grandson attended the camp last summer. “He said, ‘They look different and spoke different and beat the crap out of me in soccer. I didn’t know them before this, and now I love them. There is a sweetness about them that is different from American kids.’ Seeing an American child learn that is a profoundly valuable thing.”

The children from Jerusalem experience a strengthening of their self-image, and gain confidence just from taking such a long trip to a place so different from their home. Additionally, “their view of America is skewed, so they get that changed and learn that it’s not all Hollywood,” Nancekivell says.

Adam Joselson, a 7^th-grader from Middlebury, attended the camp in 2009. “My feelings about Kids4Peace are complicated,” he says. I had fun and learned a lot. I think it’s one of the most important organizations working for peace in the Middle East.” While the camp goals are to create trust, peace, and understanding, its greatest force for change may be that the campers, as Joselson puts it, “acknowledge each other as just kids.”

For more information, visit www.kids4peacevt.org.