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PeaceJam Comes to Nashville: "One Student's Experience" |
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Posted 1/30/2013 at 12:04 PM by Kate C in Affiliate News
Affiliate: Mid-South |
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Congratulations to our new Mid-South Affiliate -- Belmont University and STARS Nashville -- on hosting a powerful PeaceJam Conference last weekend!
  Nashville Scene wrote:
By Hannah Hyde
I learned about PeaceJam Mid-South from a friend last August. She mentioned something about a Nobel Peace Laureate, Shirin Ebadi, and high school kids. I was intrigued but hesitant. I understood the concept of PeaceJam, but really had no idea on how it was going to be carried out...
Little did I know that by the end of the weekend, I'd walk away with the best experience of my four years at Belmont.
...The conference started Friday night with a public lecture by Dr. Ebadi, who speaks minimal English, so a translator was used. She launched into a passionate speech about stopping the enrichment of uranium used for nuclear energy in Iran, then moved into foreign policy and ended by addressing the general indifference of America’s youth. My head was spinning. I kept wondering what on earth I had gotten myself into. Nuclear energy? Foreign policy? They had always been vaguely abstract ideas that hadn’t really infiltrated my tiny Nashville bubble. But the indifference? That I had a grasp on.
... I grew into being a teenager and then an adult in a post-9/11 world, where hearing about school shootings, car bombs and gang-related fatalities was just another Tuesday. I think we’re apathetic towards violence because we’re over-saturated with violence. But hearing these kids address the violence in their homes shook me to the core.
The second day of PeaceJam features the “Ceremony of Inspiration,” where students can take the stage and share the the things from the conference that inspired them. We had only been together as a group for 24 hours, and numerous students and mentors shared some of the most personal and precious things I’d heard. In front of hundreds of strangers, people told stories of former abuse, or how someone they had just met had moved them to change their way of thinking. Most of the room was in tears. This moment, this hour of the day gave me hope that the kids that are now 14, 15, 16 — kids who aren’t really children but aren’t really adults — will actually change the world.
At the end of the opening lecture on Friday night, a participant asked what we could do as young people to galvanize our efforts concerning human rights around the world. Ebadi responded that we must become introspective, and stop being indifferent to local and global issues. We must determine what the purpose of life is. Is it to be born, to go to school, to work, to have a house, to grow old and then die? If we look at life this way, life will be meaningless. If we look at our lives as a series of standardized tests, student loans, bounced checks, mortgage payments and retirement homes, it will have no meaning.
There were numerous remarkable moments throughout the weekend — many were obvious, but some were very moving in the most subtle of ways. .... In one moment, an Iranian Nobel Laureate and a room full of teenagers expressed what we had spent the whole weekend talking about — love, kindness, compassion and hope belong to everyone. |
Read Full Article Here |
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