House of Peace Teen Leaders Begin Their "Mentor-Buddy" Pebbles Project

The House of Peace Teen Leaders were table leaders for our yearly high school youth forum called, “Pebbles of Peace outweighing Boulders of Violence.” Every year, The Teen Leaders help teach a different aspect of peacemaking. This year, our theme was reconciliation, since 2009 was declared the Year of Reconciliation by the United Nations.

At Pebbles, the morning is spent in mixed groups, learning new concepts and leadership skills. At noon, we are joined by community leaders from different aspects of leadership, such as education, law enforcement, government, business, media, and the non profit sector. During the afternoon, youth rejoin the other students from their own schools, congregations and youth organizations in order to plan a project or activity that will somehow apply their learning and/or spread the learning it to other youth.

This year, the Teen Leaders’ Pebbles project was to start a “mentor-buddy program” with younger siblings, cousins, neighbors and friends. Each Teen Leader invited another young person to come to House of Peace on December 19, share in our “Christmas banquet” meal and gift exchange, and participate in a short program on apology, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Saturday morning, the Teen Leaders held a regular practice for the workshop they will be teaching in January and March, Hope is Something You Do. Then at noon, their “buddies” arrived. They sat down for a lasagna lunch, and then had our traditional gift exchange. Teen Leaders choose names and bring a gift for the person whose name they chose. They also brought gifts for their buddies.

After some mingle “name” games, we played a Christmas symbol activity, in which participants found partners with the same symbol, then guessed the meaning and history of the symbol before finding an envelope with additional information. Card swapping and additional pairings led to more information sharing regarding the symbols until participants learned the history and meaning of up to 40 different symbols.

The Teen Leaders performed a skit about apology, forgiveness and reconciliation – the same skit they performed at Pebbles this past November 13th. Then in small groups, they led their “buddies” in conversation, discussing things like childhood memories of apologies and forgiveness, and whether it’s harder to forgive or ask for forgiveness… and why.

At the end of the short program, the “buddies” all got to say what they liked the most about the day… “We had fun” was a common theme, along with “I wasn’t sure I was going to like this” and a listing of things they learned – about reconciliation, about Christmas, about reasons and ways to apologize when they hurt someone and to forgive people who hurt them.

They will see their “buddies,” again in March, when they do a version of their “Hope Is Something You Do” workshop for them and have further discussion about peacemaking.