HTAC: HIGHLIGHTING THE PEACE EDUCATION PROGRAM (PEP)
It was June 1996 and HTAC director Suraya Sadeed stood in the U.S. Senate chambers' inner sanctum. Politely addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Near East and South Asia, she challenged the legislators to consider the future of children in Afghanistan, children caught in a seemingly endless cycle of poverty, violence and 17 years of war:
How can we expect children who have never seen peace and love, or experienced a normal family life to be well-adjusted adults The child, who was born seventeen years ago, is a young adult now. Ten years from now he will be sitting across from you and will be negotiating and discussing the future of his country and region. If we do not help him now, the only language he would be speaking would be the language of hate and revenge.
Now, eleven years later, with many of those uneducated, unemployed and still traumatized "young adults" defining the rank and leadership of the insurgents in a country struggling to gain stability and peace, HTAC is moving forward to challenge the decades of conflict and distrust and build the foundations for fundamental individual and societal change. As such, HTAC implements a Peace Education Program (PEP) in sponsored Afghan schools, a project grounded in Gandhi's philosophy that the only way to have real peace in the world is to begin with the children
Peace Room at ABO Primary School, Paghman District, April 2007. 
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Using a three-prong intervention, the Peace Education program introduces the children to conflict resolution and such character-building principals as how to be truthful and patient, how to deal with anger and sadness, and how to ask for forgiveness. Secondly, it provides a Peace Room in each school where students can work with two trained teachers and trained student peer mediators to work through conflict and resolve problems. Using role playing with skits and puppets, consultation, mediation techniques, poetry writing, and drawing, children learn the meaning of peace and cooperation. In the warm, color-drenched center decorated with individual letters, handmade and signed quilts, and pictures made by children in the United States, the students come to understand that they are valued by their peers in a larger world beyond their village and country. Finally, PEP trains teachers in Peace Education, who can in turn train other teachers. Since introducing PEP in their schools, teachers have celebrated the improved student behavior and decline of conflict and harassment both in and out of the classroom.
HTAC introduced the first pilot Peace Education program in 2002 at Abdullah Bin Omar School, its model primary school in Paghman District outside Kabul. The program now enrolls 125 students in after-school programs in five sponsored schools. Besides Abdullah Bin Omar, the program thrives in Samangan Province at Aybak School, Aynacha Middle School, Joy Zwandoon Middle School, and Ajaness Malika Girls School, which serve over 8,000 girls.
Their faces shine, the boys with buzz-shaven heads and bright sweaters and jackets draping their energetic bodies, the girls' pale faces and dark hair wrapped like Renaissance Florentine ladies in long white scarves. They press against the brightly- colored mural showing children holding hands around a green and blue earth, run their fingers over the English block- printed signatures on the patchwork quilt on the wall, and hold up the robed and turbaned puppets. For a moment, the children stand silent, their breath caught, as if aware this is a sacred place. Then the first boy grins, bumps the second, and they all move in slow motion to the chairs lining the room, and begin their questions.
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Young ABO students in the Peace Room
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Once modeled and learned, the PEP methods and ideas move with each child out into a family and a community. As the program spreads to schools across the country, it will provide a core of new non-violent leaders and thinkers. It will offer a way to turn around decades of war-built prejudices and ethnic divisions, teach alternatives to violence, and allow for the building of the tolerant and peaceful multicultural nation which Afghanistan must become if it is to survive and find permanent peace. From its small but b roots, HTAC's Peace Education Program will ensure that education for Afghan children begins to stop speaking “the language of hate and revenge," and moves to meet those ideals of the Convention on the Rights of the Children (Article 29), to prepare children
for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all people.
As a program sponsor for Help the Afghan Children, your donation will go directly to provide training, equipment, materials and space to multiple and extend vital programs such as Peace Education. Your contributions will ensure that one day a Peace Education room becomes a norm in every school and that PEP's innovative curriculum of mediation techniques, nonviolent philosophy and nurturing hands-on educational tools can expand further to reach and change communities, decision-maker and educators. When you become a program sponsor for PEP, you can inspire and bring peace to a new generation.
In addition, you can choose to support HTAC's vital work in other creative and necessary programs—Computer Education, Environmental Education, Community School Committees, and "Read Afghanistan." One precious and eager child at a time, your program sponsorship will permanently change this generation of Afghan lives and empower their world with the tools for peace and productivity.
--Frances Connell, HTAC Board Member
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