by Barbe Chambliss
Finally, a book about how to actually make peace! In a world framed by digital screens and talking heads, 15 women quietly invited Barbe Chambliss into their lives to share intimate conversations about how they make peace. Read Women Peacemakers to hear about their techniques and learn how to wake up the “conscious peacemaker” in yourself.
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Sparked by a curiosity about how peace is actually created, this mediator and psychotherapist from Colorado zigzagged the globe to interview a willing pool of peacemakers where they live.
We see individual tactics meld into a pool of common strategies for crafting genuine peace. Chambliss calls them “Lessons Learned from the Peacemakers,” offering them as practices that anyone can integrate into daily life to foster individual and communal peace.
Chambliss shares the remarkable stories of this wildly diverse cadre of women change agents, from an Israeli soldier to an Irish nun, a Clan Mother to an ex-princess, a paralyzed Olympic skier to a young Zimbabwean orphan who now directs the esteemed Future of Hope Foundation.
Sadako Sasaki was only two years old when she was exposed to radiation from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. As she grew up she developed leukemia (A-bomb disease). She learned of the Japanese tradition of being granted one’s most desired wish if they had the patience to fold 1,000 paper origami cranes. One story is that her wish was for a world without nuclear weapons. Sadako folded 644 cranes in her hospital bed. Her classmates also folded cranes, enough so that when Sadako died at age twelve she was buried with 1,000 cranes. Her story infused the origami crane with the symbolism of hope and peace.
Japan has dedicated the site of the A-bomb as Peace Memorial Park. One of the buildings on the site is the Children’s Peace Monument. There is a tall bell with a statue of Sadako atop it. Within the bell is a large bronze crane that creates a ringing sound when it touches the sides of the bell. There are glass cases containing thousands of origami cranes sent by people from all over the world as symbols of their hope for world peace.
The cranes that are donated each year amount to 10 metric tons, more than the weight of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs combined. Each year last year’s paper cranes are recycled into notebooks and are sent to schools to promote peace activities.
