Global Action for Peace Month

“Peace begins with a smile.” Mother Teresa

INLEXCA are proud members of the Federation EIL, a non-profit organization that actively sends volunteers around the world as part of the Experiment in International Living movement. This month, they are advocating ‘Building Peace through Understanding’, a month of action for global peace. As we believe this is an incredibly important message, we were excited to be a part of the movement here in Guatemala.

Federation EIL has partners all around the world and each partner is doing something in their local community to talk about and share ideas about peace. If you would like to see what Federation EIL has done around the world, search #FEIL4Peace.

As I mentioned in my last blog we took our wonderful group of Minnesota volunteers to a soup kitchen in Santa Lucia to paint a wall. This wall will be painted over the next few weeks by the local project with something that, to them, symbolises peace. The project are going to talk to the kids about global peace, how to build it and what it means for the future. Once they understand the idea, the kids will be given the chance to paint something on their new wall that, to them, symbolises peace. Every time they come in to get a healthy meal and at soup kitchen, they will be able to look at the wall and think about peace. Keep an eye on my future blogs to find out what the kids decided to paint!

This week, continuing the theme, we also took some volunteers to a local education project in Santo Tomas. Here they received a similar chat to the one given to the kids in the soup kitchen. They were taught about peace in their local community and global peace. The kids from it really interesting and engaged in the conversation, sharing their ideas of peace. Once the discussion was over, the children were asked to do different drawings that, for the, symbolised peace. It was a really nice activity which allowed the children to think about an important subject, something I think the world will agree, we desperately need to be talking more about.