Members of the Portage Boys & Girls Club learned that peace isn’t just something that happens between nations. It begins within each of us.
A Peace Run team’s visit prompted the children to take that lesson to heart.
“That yearning for peace, it exists in every human heart,” Salil Wilson, of Australia, said.
The runners stopping at the club were from Latvia, Portugal, Australia, Croatia, Italy, New Zealand and the United States. Children were invited to guess each country based on clues the runners gave. The lucky guessers were invited up to point out the country on a large world map.
The runners aim for 60 to 80 miles a day, Wilson said. That didn’t happen Friday, when they stopped at Boys & Girls Clubs in Hammond, Gary and Portage before heading to Indiana Dunes National Park on their way to Michigan.
At each stop, the runners recognize someone with their Torchbearer award. “It’s always for a person who cares about the community,” Kirova said.
In Portage, Austin Bonta was bestowed the honor, a medal he proudly received.
Bonta, who is this year’s chairman of the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission, spoke to the children, urging them to think about the region they live in. It’s Northwest Indiana, but it’s also part of the Calumet Region. Bonta is trying to get that term used more widely.
Calumet means peace, Bonta told the children. “We live in a place that means peace, and that’s how we would always treat each other.”
One of the runners led the children through a breathing exercise. “We feel peace and love in our hearts,” he said, so he told the children to put their hands on their hearts.
If you take just 10 seconds in the morning to focus on that peace and love, you become friends with those feelings, and those feelings become friends with you too, he said.
The Peace Run movement began with the Sri Chinmoy Oneness-Home Peace Run, which was founded in 1987. Since then, it has visited almost every nation. In the United States, it’s covering 10,000 miles through all 50 states, stopping to gather soil from each state.
In Portage, volunteers gathered teaspoons of soil to combine with samples from other states to plant a peace tree.
Wilson said the movement helps runners connect with others on a deep level and spreads a desire for peace.
The United States has great beauty, including the Grand Canyon, Yosemite National Park and elsewhere, but that’s not the greatest beauty Wilson has seen here. “It’s the people, because the people are really unique,” he said.
“Sometimes the America you see on the news is not the real America.”
“We go to Boys & Girls Clubs all around America, and they’re all such wonderful people,” Wilson said.
Before the Peace Run stop in Portage, the Boys & Girls Club members prepared for the visit with performances, as well as artwork and writing poems, Senior Director of Education and Academic Programming Marina Kirova said. “Now it’s summertime. They have such a short time to get ready,” she said.
She first heard about Peace Run in 2018, when a coworker introduced her to it, and has invited the runners to stop at the club every second year since.
“The kids loved it. I loved it,” Kirova said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.