Peace in the world starts in your country.
Peace in your country starts in your community.
Peace in your community starts in your heart.
World peace isn’t the world’s responsibility, it’s yours.
— Hannah Frances Ford, Annunciation Catholic School, eighth grade
They have grown up in a decade of conflict. Unlike their parents, they can’t remember a time when the United States was not at war. It’s intimated in the fraying yellow ribbons that can still be seen in many communities as quiet reminders of those who were called to serve. It is on the news, in the newspaper, on the streets and in the classrooms.
For those who have grown up in the shadow of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, there is a need to understand not only what happened, but why. Children pose questions that sometimes shock parents and teachers with both their insight and their innocence.
At Annunciation Catholic School, fifth grade teacher Jennifer David does her best to explain. Sometimes even she is at a loss for words.
Wednesday, as students gathered in front of the school’s “peace pole” to place pinwheels inscribed with messages of harmony and hope, Davis pondered the impact Sept. 11 has had on her students and on the world. The activity has become an annual part of Annunciation’s participation in International Peace Day, an annual event started in 2005 by Florida art teachers Ann Ayers and Ellen McMillan as a way to help their own students cope by taking a familiar childhood symbol — the pinwheel — and using it to spread a message of global goodwill.
When David first learned of the project, she decided Annunciation should join schools worldwide in the effort. Part of a Catholic education is teaching students to be stewards of peace, and the pinwheels seemed like a good way to begin a discussion of not just what peace means for the world but personally as well.
Sometimes, her students say things that surprise her. They ask why people can’t just agree to stop fighting. They ask why countries can’t just send an olive branch with a note saying, “Let’s not do this anymore.” They don’t always understand the complexities.
“It’s hard,” David says. “I don’t know that I do a very good job of explaining it. I just help them talk about it and say ‘Maybe when you’re older, you’ll be able to do that,’ or ‘A lot of times adults do things that don’t make sense.'”
She and her colleagues talk to the school’s 130 kindergarten through eighth graders (the highest level taught at Annunciation) about what they can do now, even as children, to create a more peaceful world.
Some, like eighth-grader Hannah Francis Ford, approach the issue on a personal level, concluding that peace begins in the heart of man.
Ford was the winner of this year’s school-wide peace poetry competition, and her mother, Heather Ford, says she was moved to tears by the glimpse she was given of not only what troubles her daughter, but also what is important to her.
In the poem, Hanna Francis Ford begins with the Sept. 11 attacks, noting “the minute that changed our country forever.”
“Most of us only felt half of what happened,” she wrote. “Thousands lost family and friends. Moms. Dads. Children. Didn’t come home on time; their seats at the dinner table, still empty. All of this because no one wants to work hard enough for world peace.”
Heather Ford says she and her husband, Dow Ford, have always made a point of eating dinner together as a family. In today’s busy world, it’s not always easy, but she never realized how much it meant to the daughter she describes as “tender-hearted.”
“The first time I heard (the poem) … I was just bawling,” Ford says. “I couldn’t believe my daughter would have such deep feelings about something. I realized she understood it a lot more deeply than a lot of people. …(It) showed me the inside of her heart and what’s important to her. If she sat down at the dinner table and a family member wasn’t there, that would be devastating to her.”
The poetry contest and pinwheels project were just two events in a weeklong discussion of peace. Students made posters. They prayed about it. They incorporated the lessons into their participation with the Project Feed Columbus food drive, which concludes Saturday. In some years, they have released doves and balloons with peaceful messages.
It’s part of Annunciation’s overall approach to educating not only their minds, but their spirits also. The school’s theme this year is “Go Make a Difference,” and David says they discuss how people can be peacemakers, even in a troubled world.
But it is the pinwheel project students tend to remember. Every year, when September arrives, one of them invariably asks, “Are we going to do that pinwheel thing again?'”
“Some just wrote a few sentences … some wrote a poem…some of the younger ones just drew pictures,” David says. “Some related it to peace in your heart and how being more peaceful with other people leads to community peace. (It starts) inside themselves and builds out.”
Carmen K. Sisson is the former news editor at The Dispatch.
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