Lakewood family builds bridges for peace

Lakewood family builds bridges for peace

The road to achieving Middle East peace is being paved - right here in Lakewood. Zenat Shariff Belkin and Mark Belkin and their two daughters, Nadia, 16, and Arriana, 14, have opened their hearts and home to two 16-year-old girls, Tamara, a Palestinian from Jerusalem, and Etti, an Israeli from Ber Sheva.

Tamara and Etti have traveled a long way from the Middle East toColorado to participate along with Nadia Belkin,a junior at Lakewood High School, in the 14 th Annual Building Bridges for Peace 2007, a flagship program of Seeking Common Ground (SCG), a Denver-based non-profit organization which is dedicated to empowering individuals with the skills "to change the world by creating peaceful communities through integration, socialization, communication and leadership development."

Over the past two weeks, the girls have worked diligently together in daily workshops from 8:30-4:30 for the first four days followed by an emotionally intensive week in Allen's Park. They were involved in many activities and projects in the course of the week. Many of the activities, such as "In Your Shoes," encouraged the girls to not only share their feelings, but to better understand the viewpoints of the "enemy" by communicating and connecting with each other. For example, they had to respond to the question, "How do you feel when"...with a variety of endings to the questions such as: "How do you feel when you are called a terrorist?" and "How do you feel when you have to get through a check point?" They learned the importance of listening to each other and finding common grounds and similarities that could help them relate to each other and understand each other. The themes of some other workshops included: Identity, Gender, The Wall, the Army, and September 11 th; all of the workshops helped the girls to express their emotions and inner-most feelings, sometimes causing them to be brutally honest. There were emotional outbursts, shouting, accusing and crying...but it was a starting point, and in order to live together peacefully, they learned that they must first and foremost, communicate.

From Allen's Park, the group returned to Denver for a celebration brunch and final farewell. It was a unique opportunity to witness the progress that had been achieved during the past week. Yara, a Palestinian girl living in Tira, near Tel Aviv, said, "you need to trust a person because he is a person, not a Jew." Lama, a Palestinian girl living in Jerusalem said, "The biggest problem is the lack of communication." Emilyn Inglis, a SCG song leader, said, "It is a time to glimpse into what the other is feeling and recognize our common humanity."

The Building Bridges for Peace program, established in 1994, has grown from 14 participants the first year to 62 present participants from the United States, Israel, and Palestine. At this year's 14th Annual Celebration Brunch, Erin Breeze, the Program Director of Building Bridges for Peace, said this was the first year that men were invited to participate in the program and 16 young men attended this year's program and worked alongside the female leaders in addressing and solving conflicts; it was also the first year that Native Americans were invited to attend in an effort to work on the dispute of the Badlands National Park on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Dr. Paige Baker, who grew up on the Fort Berthel Reservation in North Dakota is the new Superintendent of the Badlands National Park; he is building bridges by working together with respective representatives. This is also the first year that Dr. Ivan Vujacic, Ambassador of Serbia to the United States, joined in the celebration of these amazing young people. At the end of the brunch, the participants sang together on stage, Israelis, Palestinians, Israeli Palestinians, Americans and Native Americans. They were one voice and as Tamara emotionally expressed, "We are one family." There were hugs, embraces and tears as the girls said farewell. The promise of peace was evident in the bridges they had built together- as Nadia explained the inner meaning of the bridge she had created with her group -it wasn't perfect and there were many obstacles and even tragedies along the way, but this bridge held the hope of paving the path for peace .