Teaching War-weary Teens at Peace Camp

After pizza, two Georgian girls took the stage and did a short folk dance--each with one arm arched overhead and legs making small scissorlike movements in the air. The girls danced to a tape of Eastern European music, circling each other, then circling in place. At the end, the campers from the United States, who attended Epworth alongside the Abkhazian and Georgian kids, applauded enthusiastically. Then the boys from Abkhazia, members of a folk-singing group that appeared on a very famous television program in the Abkhaz region, took the stage. Their voices rang out as if in a vast Gothic cathedral, not in a camp dining hall. And while they sang their folk song, one of the boys did something unexpected.

The boy came off the stage, grabbed the hand of one of the Georgian dancers, and led her on stage to join him. She and the other Georgian girl danced again and joined in the singing. For that little while, they were just a row of kids singing--showing off, goofing around, being kids. They were not enemies anymore. Rui-Ling whispered to me: "I'm blown away! This is the highlight of my summer. This is a tremendous thing. These countries have never mixed. The fact that they're doing cultural things together--I'm blown away right now!"

Up until that pizza lunch, the two groups had always sung and danced separately. Anna, who translated from Russian into English, saw a subtle change in the wording of the songs the children sang. At the onset, the children of each group sang nationalist songs with only their own country mentioned. However, as the weeks wore on, they began changing the words to unify the nations. They began to sing of the Caucasus region, not just Georgia or Abkhazia.

Both Abkhazia and Georgia have their own languages. The counselors originally feared that the kids wouldn't want to speak their common language, Russian, because it was the language of their oppressors. But this was not a problem. What was a problem was the schedule the CCRC had prepared for the campers. The teens were emphatic in their displeasure with feeling overscheduled and having to camp out at Epworth. After calling 50 to 60 hotels in the region, the CCRC finally put the kids up in a motel and bused them to Epworth during the day. One counselor speculated that camping was too much like living in a refugee camp.

A few days before my visit, money was stolen from two of the campers. The issue of theft arises at any camp anywhere. However, building trust was a fundamental principle at the Peace Camp. Though the money was not returned, on the day of my visit the kids and counselors had a long talk about theft, respect, and trust. This was why the kids visited the underground cave at Epworth. The cave visit was what Terry Murray, a guide for the CCRC, called adventure-based learning. "It's not enough to know the concepts," Terry said. "The real test is when the problem is difficult. How do we learn to trust and cooperate? That's the heart of the camp."

The previous afternoon the kids took a ropes course. They had either to climb the ropes alone or to spot each other from the ground. When asked on the afternoon of my visit what they learned on the ropes course, the kids shouted out: "How to take care of each other"..."How to save each other"..."To be creative"..."We need to trust"..."Mutual understanding"...and "To solve our problems." Terry commented that this active approach to problem solving is powerful. Taking risks emotionally and physically and then reflecting on the experience later often results in growth. Adventure-based learning appeared to bring abstract concepts to life.

By the end of the month, Rui-Ling reported that a sense of unity eventually prevailed. "We worked together harmoniously and creatively," she said. The kids completed tasks, anticipated problems, and solved problems together. She cited team scavenger hunts as an example of kids' practicing skills and working together across regional lines.

Rui-Ling and Anna feared for the lives of the children when they returned home. They wondered what having attended a camp with the enemy would mean to them. On one of the last days of camp, Rui-Ling said: "We've been told by more than three of the teens that they don't want to go home." Anna added: "When they go back, the conflict is deep-rooted. Everything is black or white." One of the concepts studied in peace class was gray thinking--to view situations as complex and not to rush to judgments of right and wrong, good and bad.

Abkhazia is a region of Georgia that was an autonomous republic within Georgia during Soviet rule. In the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, formed the policy of glastnost, (openness), nationalist movements grew. In 1991, Georgia became the first republic to secede from the Soviet Union. Though ethnic Abkhazians were always a minority in Abkhazia, where ethnic Georgians were in the majority, the Abkhazians started a civil war in 1992, proclaiming Abkhazia a sovereign state.

In 1992, Eduard Sheverdnadze, a native son of Georgia, was dispatched to the Georgia-Abkhazia region along the Black Sea to restore stability. In 1993, with Russian backing, the Abkhaz forces defeated the Georgian military. Since then, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Georgians have been expelled from Abkhazia.

In 1994, Georgia became a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The CIS currently supports Georgia in the conflict, pressuring Abkhazia to rejoin Georgia by providing peacekeeping forces for the region and instituting blockades against the Abkhazians. Talks on the status of Abkhazia and its autonomy within Georgia remain deadlocked, and many Georgian refugees who wish to return to the Abkhaz region remain displaced. For a story about UMCOR's ministry with internally displaced youth in Georgia, see New World Outlook, March-April 1999, 26-29.