A Camp That Lets Children Give Peace a Chance

It was a summer camp that dealt more with Rosa Parks than national parks, and less with bows and arrows than the Iroquois Indian Confederacy that served as a government model for the Founding Fathers.

More than 50 children from Orange County and beyond attended the sixth annual Peace Camp, held this week at the Fullerton Arboretum. The camp, like others around the country, is sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, a 70-year-old activist group.

Coordinator Chris Lamm said the camps are designed to bring together children in first through ninth grades from all ethnic and economic backgrounds. By making crafts, writing plays and telling stories, the children learn that they can make a difference in their schools, communities and the world by promoting peace, tolerance and environmentalism.

“Children need a place where they can learn how to figure out conflicts, how to manage them,” said Rheta Negrete-Karwin, in her fifth year as a camp counselor.

The centerpiece of the weeklong day camp was a sculpture the children created with their own toys, a 3-foot wide peace sign constructed from violent toys or toys that seemed stereotypical to them, such as a pink Barbie convertible.

The sculpture included a radio from the movie “Small Soldiers,” which barked “prepare to attack” and made machine-gun sounds, and even a screwdriver, placed there by a girl who said her father told her she couldn’t fix cars because of her gender.

One group wrote and performed a play about a teen whose friend brings a gun to his house, which the teen’s mother discovers. But the group realized they had to get rid of the stereotypes they had included in their own play; the mother character did all the sweeping, cooking and laundry.

“We’re trying to show people guns aren’t good, and different people can think the same even if they look different on the outside,” said one of the performers, 11-year-old Paige Turpen of Huntington Beach, in her second year as a camper.

Turpen said she also enjoyed making dream dolls. The campers wrote wishes on the dolls, and when the wishes come true, they’ll pass the dolls on to others to use. She said she wished for less racism and less childhood death from disease.