Chronicles of Peace

November 17th, it is 9 o’clock in the morning. We are working, as we do every Wednesday in the primary school of the community of Los Ricos, in San Miguel de Allende County, Guanajuato, Mexico.  It’s been a little over three months now since we started working in this school.  We begin every session with a meditation exercise called ¨heart coherence¨, where we visualize breathing with our hearts, then slowly opening our eyes to great each person in the circle with our eyes letting them know we are glad to see them.  Right away you can hear the happy voice of one of the children saying: ¨Let’s sing Ama lama¨- ¨No, En lak´ech!¨ says another. The classroom explodes with kids voices naming one song after another, and in a wonderfully diplomatic way we soon reach an agreement and begin to dance and sing the Dances of Universal Peace together.

 

The kids are already familiar with their internal energy referred to in this Project as their ¨love light¨ and understand that it is possible for our love light to shine brightly even during difficult times.  The children have been introduced to Black Elk and his vision for a world where all creatures live in harmony with each other. They are also familiar with Black Elk´s medicine wheel, and the two roads we all travel, the road of lessons and the road of peace.  At the front of the classroom we can see the small tree referred to as ¨the tree of peaceful actions¨ and notice that some flowers have been placed upon its branches.  William asks the group:  ¨are all of these flowers representations of actions that you observed of your fellow class mates doing a loving action?¨ And the children begin to tell us about all the peaceful actions that they observed since our last visit.

 

Now we all sit on the ground in a circle.  William gets out his magic bag and removes from it two puppets, one a giraffe and the other a jackal and says to the group: ¨I would like to introduce you to two new friends we have brought with us today.  They have come here to help us learn a new language, a language of peace¨. During the activities we are constantly surprised with the ease and speed at which children are able not only to assimilate but also put into practice this new language.

 

Lucha, a teacher and also the principle of the school has seen many generations of students and teacher during her 21 years at the school.  She is enthusiastic in her comments about the positive changes that she has seen since this project began.  She shares her experiences, explaining that she used to spend the large majority of her time separating students to keep them from fighting one another.  She says that this year there has not been a single fight or occasion to have to keep students apart.  So I ask her:

 

What made you decide to take the gamble of opening the doors of your school to this Peace Project?

 

And she answered:

Our school, because we are located so far away from the town of San Miguel de Allende, is often forgotten. One day an American gave me a ride to the school, his name was Bob and he was part of an organization called Feed the Hungry.  He helped us build a kitchen for the school.  Later, he introduced me to a lady named Diana, another volunteer of the program and she told me about a couple of friends working on a Peace Project and said that they were interested in coming to our school to work with the children.  I said to myself, ¨this is what we need, Peace.  This is how I came to meet Laura and William and their project. Today I know that I made the right decision.  Sometimes I see the children on the playground singing to themselves or in groups, the songs from the Project.  Once I came across a kid with his hands on his heart. I asked him if he was ok.  He said that he had been extremely angry a few minutes ago but now that he had done a heart coherence he was feeling much calmer and happier.  I think that just like any new language we try to learn, it take a number of years to become fluent.  It would be wonderful if programs like this one would be added to the curriculum permanently in every school.  I recommend to the teachers of the other groups that when they see that the students are getting restless that they take a moment to meditate, as they do in the Peace Project activities, even if it’s just a minute.  The children understand that it is a moment of meditation and preparation for work, and they begin to relax and I can continue to teach.

 

 

I say goodbye to Lucha thanking her and head off to find the other two younger teachers.  One is named Aurelia and she is in charge of the 5th and 6th graders.  The other is called Magdalena and she teaches the 1stand 2 grades.  Aurelia tells me about how she incorporated the characters of the giraffe and jackal to explain the difference between a protagonist and an antagonist, since she knew that the kids were familiar with how and in jackal we use judgment to express ourselves and in giraffe we only say that which we have observed.  Now speaking to Magdalena that shares with me how during an ethics and values class she referenced the ¨tree of peaceful actions¨ to teach how when we help someone within our community we are in fact helping ourselves since we belong to that community.

 

It’s now 1 o’clock and we are getting ready to end our activity with the 5th and 6th graders.  We sit down again in a circle on the floor and after lighting a candle, meditate one more time.  We all channel the vibration of our energy as we chant together 3 ¨ohm’s¨  followed by a recognition of the divine light in each person with a: Namaste.

 

We hear the school bell announced the end of the school day and the kids run to the school central courtyard. Students, teachers and the members of the Children’s Global Peace Project dance together the Dances of Universal Peace that each class has practiced during the day.  Hugs are exchanged easily and you can hear the words ringing out ¨see you next week¨…