By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
Seven-year-old Olivia Lepschat is as wiggly as the red wiggler composting worms she’s learning about. But you can’t blame her for it. It’s the first day of the August 2004 Middle East Peace Camp, and she’s surrounded by dozens of new faces from different backgrounds.
While King County Master Gardener Carolyn Barden and Emily Bishton, Washington State University Master Gardener of Wetlands and Water Pollution, try to make composting and wetland preservation as cool as they can, a peace puzzle being assembled across the lawn lures even the most environmentally aware kid.
It’s all part of this year’s theme, “The Environment: Knowing and Caring for our Planet,” designed to take the MEPC campers to the next level – increasing the peace by taking care of our common home, the earth.
“They need to be global citizens of the world and a huge part of that is the environment,” says Lori Markowitz, a co-founder of the MEPC. “It could be cleaning up a park, conserving water or using energy. This is a very big part of peace.”
Now in its third year, the MEPC is hosting roughly 25 Arab and Palestinian children and 33 Israeli and Jewish children. Ten more campers attending are African-American, Japanese, Native American or Asian.
“I’ve learned that people have different ideas about peace,” says 11-year-old Eli Davis, who is looking forward to becoming a counselor-in-training at the camp next year. “Some people think that not polluting is peaceful but I think that not fighting is peaceful.”
Camp directors watch registration and manage the process in order to keep the groups evenly balanced.
“I’m very passionate about this,” says Markowitz. “I really believe peace will happen through the children. It’s about trying to understand what your role is and what you can do to change the world.”
The MEPC was organized in 2002 to bring together local youth whose family backgrounds are Middle Eastern or who come from homes where one spouse is of Middle Eastern origin. The camp is designed to encourage these children to establish relationships of trust and friendship with children of similar backgrounds before negative ideological hand-me-downs can divide them.
In addition to the eclectic camp activities that include food, arts and crafts from around the world, campers can learn belly dancing, get henna tattoos, and even practice Middle Eastern drumming, thanks to a community-lending program sponsored by John’s Drums in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood.
Guest speakers are invited in to talk about their peace organization and facilitate group discussions tailored to the mind and intellect of a young child.
This year Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) visited the peace camp. Cantwell, who is taking an increased interest in Middle East affairs, talked informally with campers about women’s rights and the fact that Washington State is one of the few states that have two female senators.
The weeklong summer camp is supported by private donations and run by several community partnerships, including the Middle East Center at the University of Washington and Beyond Borders.
“We’re trying to get deeper and deeper into the issues of peace and justice,” says Susan Davis, co-founder of MEPC and executive director of Kadima, one of the three major community partners with the camp, along with the Arab Center of Washington and One World Now! Bullitt Foundation. “We’re trying to evolve from a foundation of friendship.”
On the only day trip of the four-day session, all 65 campers and 25 counselors visited IslandWood, a 255-acre outdoor learning center located on Bainbridge Island.
IslandWood provides outdoor field experiences for both children and adults that bring together the fields of scientific inquiry, technology, and the arts. Their mission is to help people of all ages to gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between biological and cultural diversity.
The campers toured the facility and learned about plants indigenous to the Northwest.
“They learn about sustainability in general,” says Susan Davis. “By the end of the week they translate this to Middle East issues of water and the sustainability of the environment.”
As a final project, campers helped design a 5-1/2 foot by 14-foot nature mural. The two co-artists in residence at the MEPC, Amineah Ayyad and Rainer Waldman Adkins, led the project that includes images of rivers, mountains and the sky as well as writing in Hebrew and Arabic.
The artists hope that the mural will be used to promote Middle East peace and co-existence at future public events and exhibitions.
“This is a nice thing for the girls because there’s a human face [on the conflict] and they will always have this understanding,” says Kathryn Lepschat, a woman of German heritage and the mother of two girls whose father is Palestinian.
“There’s hurt on both sides of the issue,” added Lepschat, “but if you can touch the child when their mind is open it’s harder for this to proliferate.”
As the camp director, watching the happy faces of sweet playful kids is the real payoff for Davis.
“We just know each other as Omar and Benjamin,” she says, “not Omar the Palestinian or Benjamin the Israeli.”