By Jack Gilroy

Veterans for Peace of Binghamton, NY held the only Children’s Peace Fair in the area—and perhaps the world—on International Peace Day. Veterans for Peace, with help from Peace Action, created Childrenspeacefair.org, the only website devoted to children’s fairs with a focus on making peace a joyous activity. We aspire to help the Children’s Peace Fair spread to schools around the world to unite us in celebrating International Peace Day on September 21.

On September 21, 2023, the dream of a Children’s Peace Fair became real for the Maine-Endwell school district in upstate New York. Hilary Rozek, the key organizer, and Jim Tokos, both fifth-grade teachers in Maine-Endwell Schools, helped bring this vision to fruition with 200 students coming together to celebrate peace. They were welcomed by the black and white Veterans for Peace flag flying and our Children’s Peace Banner which pictures children playing under the caption: “There Is No Joy In Nuclear Weapons.”

Students were able to participate in many peace-themed activities. Ten-year-old kids were joyously participating in magic tricks with magician David Black. Master Magician Black used the Golden Rule as a fun way to teach caring for one another and stayed after the show to teach small groups magic tricks. Most kids scattered to one of the eighteen fun stations in an outdoor rural setting of grass and trees, including visiting with Jennifer the Bird Lady and her parrots in the pagoda. 

Some kids rushed to learn how to drum on five-gallon pails in a twenty-person circle on a tennis court setting. Other kids painted peace rocks or tried on kimonos, helped by former United Nations diplomat, Helena Garan. They learned how to fold paper into origami cranes and listened beneath huge oak trees to bird songs by flutist Ann Austin. Others learned how to ring chimes to the tune of Happy Birthday, coded with ozobots, or learned how to write one’s name in Arabic, Russian, or Chinese.

Kids loved having their pictures taken and edited with Photoshop to make a peace symbol backdrop. Other activities included sidewalk chalk drawings with peace images, making bridges of peace with popsicle sticks, tasting honey from a beekeeper’s honeycombs, learning about the life of trees from an arborist, and relaxing under a shagbark hickory tree doing meditative yoga with Mrs. DeLuca.

At the end of the day, Jim Tokos closed the fair by giving a quick lesson on solar energy and then led over 200 children on a silent Peace walk around the solar farm next to the elementary school. He informed the students that the school district supplies all its own electricity for a large high school, middle school, and two elementary schools through energy produced by the solar farm. He emphasized the savings of money for the school district was secondary to saving our mother earth by reducing fossil fuel burning, 

The ten-year-olds, after a minute of silence, lined up and were asked to walk with another student from a different school. In just one more year, the suburban kids from Endwell and rural kids from Maine, NY, will come together in a common middle school setting in Endwell. Country and suburban cousins now meeting for the first time at the Peace Fair had the chance to learn and grow with each other.

The event ended with the planting of a tree of hope for peace, the tree that survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the gingko.

We hope our success can help inspire similar events across the US and around the world. Peace happens when people learn about each other’s lives and come together around positive themes.