Peace Camp Project

I'm in the middle of my secondary project which started last May and now culminating with the actual teaching. At our Spring voluntary training, the director of the George Price Peace Center spoke about her initiative to train teachers on conflict resolution. Of course, this immediately hooked me to the possible secondary project. She invited me to one of her training teachers' workshop - I came away quite impressed with her program that begins the training in the Belmopan schools. If the program is successful, she hopes that the schools will adopt it throughout the country. After meeting with her, I agreed to help her create a pilot summer program for children on conflict resolution. She wanted two workshops: one for primary school children and the second for high school level kids. I didn't think I could handle both groups and recruited a Peace Corps volunteer, Anthony, who is an elementary teacher. The good thing happened that the Center got a PC volunteer in June to help facilitate the workshops. This was a perfect venue for me since my background included alternative conflict resolution and mediation.

The first workshop happened in July for two weeks. Twenty kids attended, and, I think, they had a good time - it was hard to connect the concepts of alternative resolutions to them but exposure the issue for the first time was good.

What was interesting with this group: these kids were "city" kids opposed to rural and had an advantage of living a little better than rural life. At the same time, they were more savvy being exposed to television, cell phones, shopping, etc.

Now, I'm in the middle of the second level of workshop for students ages 12 to 16 years - the class of 15 students from all over Belmopan schools included kids from Mayan, Creole, Mestizos and Kechi families - the range of diversity resulted in different levels of language skills. The curriculum entailed more intricate concepts and processes - hopefully, more thoughtful and useful in their everyday lives. With the help of the new PC volunteer and additional support from his wife, also a volunteer in the schools, the curriculum fleshed out with ice breakers and team building activities. So far, the kids seemed connected with the classes and I really look forward to a positive outcome of this pilot program.