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Trio attended PeaceJam in Colorado
and worked with Nobel laureates
GAIL SMITH-ARRANTS
gsmith-arrants@charlotteobserver.com
Students at Carolina International School marked
the International Day of Peace on Thursday with
music and with speeches by three students who
attended a peace gathering in Colorado last weekend.
The students participated in the 10th anniversary
celebration of the PeaceJam Foundation at the
University of Denver.
The goal of PeaceJam is to create a new generation
of peacemakers.
Samira Abdelrahman, Amritha Amarnath and David
Illing joined 3,000 youth from 32 countries to
work with 10 Nobel Peace Prize winners. The Nobel
laureates included East Timor Prime Minister Jose
Ramos-Horta, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond
Tutu and Shirin Ebadi, recognized for her work
for democracy, peace and women's rights in the
Middle East.
The local students attended workshops and presentations
by the laureates. They also told Ramos-Horta about
some community-service projects their school had
worked on during the past two years.
Carolina International raised more than $3,200
for Hurricane Katrina victims; raised $1,000 to
install a system to catch rainwater at a sister
school in Rweteera, Uganda; and raised another
$1,000 to construct a restroom facility for another
sister school in Accra, Ghana.
Samira, Amritha and David are all 14-year-old
ninth-graders at the public charter school, which
added its first freshman class this year. The
school has 416 students, and Samira and Amritha
have been at the school since it opened in 2004.
All three, interviewed last week, said they learned
a lot from their weekend in Colorado.
Samira met Ramos-Horta and took a class with
Mairead Corrigan Maguire, who, with Betty Williams,
won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for their work
in Northern Ireland. The two women founded the
Northern Ireland Peace Movement (later renamed
Community of Peace People).
"I learned that making a difference doesn't
just mean you have to help the whole world,"
Samira said. "It can just start with helping
people. ... And just teaching them different things,
like how to spread peace."
David said the message he took home was, "We
don't need to fight to settle disputes. We don't
need guns, and we don't need to try and kill people."
"If there's hundreds of starving people
... you just feed one, one person at a time,"
he said. "The whole point of PeaceJam was
that kids are not as helpless as people think.
They have power. They have power to help people."
Amritha said the most important thing is to do
something, anything.
"Everybody can do something, but people
actually have to get up and do it, instead of
sitting back and letting it come to them,"
she said.
Gail Smith-Arrants: 704-786-2185
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