St. Frances Peace Camp plants nonviolent values

The Catholic Review

By Chaz Muth
cmuth@catholicreview.org

As 8-year-old Darrell Truesdale runs down the cor­ridors of St. Frances Acade­my in Baltimore on a recent summer morning, the inner­city youth prepares for a les­son about Mahatma Gandhi, the slain political and spiritu­al leader of India who advo­cated nonviolent solutions.

The session is part of a force­ful curriculum at the school’s summer-long Peace Camp, designed to teach Baltimore’s children how to rebuke the violence plaguing city streets.

Though it’s the third year St. Frances Academy has offered a free, six-week, all-day camp, this is the first summer it has a “peace” theme.

The camp’s mission is to engage the 34 children enrolled in a variety of activ­ities that teach realistic and valuable lifelong lessons in resolving conflicts in a peace­ful manner.

For the first two years, the camp’s focus was on litera­cy – which continues – but organizers decided that Bal­timore’s rising violent crime rate and the continuing war in Iraq were desensitizing city youths to aggressive behavior in settling disputes.

“The kids are affected by violence in the streets,” said Ralph Moore, director of the St. Frances Academy Com­munity Center. “The message is all about fighting in this cul­ture. We want to instill nonvio­lent values and assert peaceful­ness in resolving differences.”

As she led children into the Chase Street school’s gym­nasium for the morning’s peace exercise, camp lead­er Iyana Wakefield’s com­manding voice reminded the youths to be respectful of one another and mind their manners – skills that will help them smooth over vio­lent circumstances.

Each week the youngsters – who live or attend school in the nearby Brentwood Vil­lage neighborhood – learn about “peaceful heroes” like Rosa Parks, Gandhi, Moth­er Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai and Martin Luther King Jr.

Fun daily activities are designed to instill respect, better listening, conflict res­olution, courageousness, for­giveness and environmental reverence.

“We also want this to be fun for the kids, so we have mov­ies we think they’ll like and play games that will show them how nonviolence will produce better results in con­flicts,” said Michael Gon­zalez, 21, a counselor at the camp and a senior at Ohio Dominican University in Columbus, Ohio.

The camp runs from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.

The peace camp’s $32,000 budget is funded by a $10,000 grant from the Bal­timore Community Founda­tion, $8,000 from the city for youth worker salaries, $2,600 raised at a pre-camp event at the school and $11,400 in business and private dona­tions, said Mr. Moore.

“If we can reach these kids when they are young, we hope we can make a differ­ence in their lives and in the climate in our communities,” Mr. Moore said.