Laureates bring more than experience to service projects
If actions speak louder than words, PeaceJam participants are already making plenty of noise.
The source is the volume of letters, appeals and ideas for peace that almost 3,000 PeaceJam participants came up with Sept. 16 during service projects led by nine of the PeaceJam laureates.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner from South Africa, urged more than 300 participants in his session to draft letters to the United Nations demanding the release of 1991 Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under either detention or house arrest in Burma, now called Myanmar, for 11 of the last 17 years.
“This little woman has these big men running scared,” Tutu said of the military junta that runs the country. “All by saying democracy and freedom. They’re scared of freedom.”
Tutu’s draft letter also called for the U.N. Security Council to place Myanmar on its official agenda, a procedure that would allow formal review of the nation’s human rights record and its effect on regional security. Without being on the agenda, the council is not permitted to take up initiatives regarding the nation.
But that part of the PeaceJam letter proved unnecessary, Tutu said, because the U.N. agreed on Sept. 15 to put Myanmar on its agenda.
“See, one person can make a heckuva difference,” the genial 74-year-old told the PeaceJam crowd, smiling broadly and exhorting them to rise and shout in unison: “I am going to make a difference!’’
The group responded eagerly and DU’s Davis Auditorium reverberated.
“If bad and evil were the norm,” Tutu said, “you and I would shrug our shoulders and say ‘tough luck,’ But we don’t say tough luck. We are made for goodness.”
The listeners bent eagerly to their tasks, drafting sentences, offering ideas and proposing comments on behalf of freedom for Suu Kyi.
But helping the embattled laureate wasn’t the only project of the afternoon. Laureate José Ramos-Horta, the 1996 winner for his work in East Timor, asked his audience to urge their elected representatives to increase assistance to the world’s poorest countries.
“The problems of global poverty have practical, proven solutions," Ramos-Horta’s letter stated. “We don’t have to stand by and let poverty destroy the lives of yet another generation. We can end poverty if we take steps now.”
Ramos-Horta’scandor struck a responsive note with Valerie Randall, a PeaceJam mentor and a senior at Metropolitan State College of Denver.
“I loved that he was so willing to talk about the difficult issues and the need for reform in the U.N.,” she says.
Ramos-Horta also asked participants to launch initiatives in their hometowns, a common PeaceJam theme and one that resonated with a number of participants.
Ashley and Corbelia Williams of the Leech Lake Reservation in Cass Lake, Minn., said they planned to organize a “healing walk” for their community and plant a “peace garden” when they returned home.
Andre Atlas of Minneapolis said he planned to form a peace committee when he returned home so people could “just come together.”
“To see a group of youth come together to promote peace is inspiring to me,” Atlas said.
Jordan Shanahan of Bristol, Vt., said he and his group from Mt. Abraham Union High School were eager to continue what they learned at PeaceJam, focusing on thorny issues of respect and communication at his school and trying to make a difference one person at a time.
It was a theme Tutu had emphasized repeatedly.
“What you do today seems like a small thing,” the laureate said. “But it’s a big thing. We mustn’t give up on the world.”
Published in The Source, Oct. 2006