Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [39]
Since that first summer, Seeds of Peace has grown ten-fold, with more than 450 teens from trouble spots around the world participating each summer. There are equal numbers of boys and girls. The Middle East delegation has been expanded to include students from Jordan, Morocco, Qatar, Yemen, and Tunisia. There are also American Seeds now, along with Turks, Greeks, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots; Indians, Pakistanis, and Afghans; and from the Balkans, Bosnians, Croatians, Serbs, Kosovars, and Macedonians. In 2004, Seeds included teams from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait in its Beyond Borders exchange program. Since 1993, more than three thousand young people from twenty-five nations have graduated from Seeds of Peace with a deeper commitment to understanding and reconciliation, and to sharing their experiences with their peers.
In addition to maintaining its camp in Maine, the organization has opened the Seeds of Peace Center for Coexistence in Jerusalem and launched an Advanced Coexistence Program in which two hundred Israelis and Palestinians meet in different locations on both sides of Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank and Israel.
These young people have done some amazing things together. In 1998, they met in Switzerland and actually developed their own Middle East Peace Plan, which resolved all outstanding issues, including the status of Jerusalem, the borders, and refugees. Seeds members have produced award-winning documentary films and instituted programs for younger Arab and Jewish children, and for refugees. They visit the White House and other important sites in Washington each year. When they reach college age, the organization offers them counseling on gaining admission to schools and financial assistance to help them pay for it when they do.
But the most important part of Seeds of Peace remains the sustained human contact among young people of different religious and ethnic groups long at odds with each other. In its 2005 annual report, Shai, an Israeli girl, offered this testimony: “We have been given a new life at this camp. We must take it home and keep it alive, spreading its meaning wherever we go.” Sabreen, a Palestinian said: “We—the teenagers—in Seeds of Peace can make a change in our families, communities, schools. It will be hard, but we can make it because we succeeded in doing that to ourselves.” Mohammed, a Pakistani, declared, “We are warriors of hope, we are masters of understanding, we are pioneers of respect, we are soldiers of trust.”
In 2000, in a heated phase of the Second Intifada, a seventeen-year-old very active Arab-Israeli Seeds of Peace member, Asel Asleh, was caught in a crossfire and killed while trying to help an injured friend. He had thirty Seeds of Peace T-shirts. He was buried in one of them. Anyone who supports Seeds of Peace is keeping that young man’s legacy alive and giving all the world’s children a better chance for a safer, brighter future.
PeacePlayers International is a youth-reconciliation program that brings people together around basketball. Founded in 2001, the organization, based in Washington, D.C., uses basketball to teach communication, cooperation, and teamwork through full-time programs in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and South Africa. Over the last couple of years, PeacePlayers has been particularly active in the Middle East, sponsoring tournaments and camps, building basketball courts in the West Bank, and in February 2006, holding the first annual Desert Hoop Classic in Jericho, involving 150 coaches and kids from Jewish and Arab communities. Twice a week, the group also brings together “twin” schools for younger Arab and Jewish boys, ages ten to twelve, for basketball and sessions on coexistence and cooperation led by young adults from the communities.
So far, PeacePlayers has used basketball to help more than 35,000 young people get to know each other, develop leadership skills, and bridge divides in their home communities. The organization is now expanding