The Tribune

By EARYEL BOWLEG

Tribune Staff Reporter

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

A CAMPAIGN was launched yesterday aimed at creating “circles of peace” in schools to teach students about kindness, respect and courage.

The Bahamas Crisis Centre’s Green Ribbon Peace campaign aims to go to four or five primary schools a week during March.

Dr Sandra Dean-Patterson, the centre’s director, highlighted the crime issue in the country and how it stems from internal as well as external factors.

She said: “We are all concerned about the reports of violence in our country, increasing numbers of adults and more recently now young people. So we recognise the need to address it, and deal with it and not just wring our hands, oh my God, what’s happening to the country? What are we going to do? There are things that we can do, there are our actions... We have to and can make a difference.”

She said that the positive qualities we want to see in children need to be named.

She said: “We have identified what we call a KRC peace campaign, which is focusing on three key pillars: kindness, respect, and courage. We want children to buy into them, internalise them, understand them and behave with those qualities, behave with those thoughts.”

She added: “So we have the presentations to the schools, the peace gardens where we hope that those schools that have space will create peace gardens in their schools. We have a competition - an essay, poem, song, logo, poster competition that will allow children to depict their understanding of the values.

“We have a parenting intervention where we will provide sensitisation to parents because there’s no use us letting children know that you need to be kind and you need to be brave, but parents need to understand.”

Noelle Nicolls, the peace programme coordinator, said a workshop has been designed and more than 150 volunteers from partner organisations have been trained.

She said: “We’re going to be going into 17 different schools simultaneously workshopping with the grade four and grade five students and this is going to be a massive operation that’s going to touch over 3,000 primary schoolchildren.

“In this workshop, what we are going to be doing is teaching the young people what we call to activate their superpowers because we want to give them the experience of actually the power of kindness. It takes no money to smile, to say something nice to somebody, to treat somebody with kindness. It takes no money.”

This campaign comes at a time when a number of teenagers have been the victims of murder. On Monday, two teens boys were killed at a residence north of Carmichael Road on Faith Avenue.

Education Minister Glenys Hanna-Martin said there is the tendency to externalise individuals’ role in what’s going on in the country.

She added that the government has a role and the criticism of the government is very apt in appropriate circumstances, but government cannot be blamed for social deterioration.

“When we see something like this thing with those two boys, and I know I’m not the only one who felt, I use the word disheartened, but disheartened doesn’t describe it. I’m not the only one. I know all of us felt some kind of way about two children with being blown away.

“We can’t say the government. We have to say, and you could say that, but you can’t just say that. We have to accept that we all have a role to play in this thing. Parents do. The church does. Corporate Bahamas does. The ministry of education does. We all have a role to play and nobody needs to be pointing no finger right now at no one. Unless no one’s doing anything. I believe a lot of people are working very hard. This effort today is the example of hard work.”