HWPL Intercontinental Religious Youth
Peace Camp 2021
“Put yourself in others’ shoes”
The HWPL Intercontinental Religious
Youth Peace Camp was held online for two days from July 17-18, involving
youth across 16 countries and among five religions.
Prior to
COVID-19, attendees gathered at temples or schools and were able to experience
a variety of religions and cultures firsthand, although limited to specific
countries and regions.
However, the
Religious Youth Peace Camp proceeded as an intercontinental event this time,
taking advantage of having to use an online platform. Through the group
activity program, participants had a time to understand and discuss a diverse
range of religions and cultures, as well as think together about the causes and solutions of conflict at the religious
level.
For
this Religious Youth Peace Camp, religious leaders of six religions,
including Buddhism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism,
explained regarding the appearance of the temple and role of the space.
The etiquette,
religious rites, and representative culture of each respective religion were
introduced through videos.
Youth
who attended the camp expressed their feelings about watching the video saying,
“I would say it was
probably the three videos we had each day explaining each religion.
So I think those
mostly helped me to understand other cultures, and it kind of gave me an idea
of what is happening,”
“Especially the
practices around the temple, how to respect them, how to clean before you enter
and things like that.
The video
presentations, they were all really good.”
In the group activity on
the first day, through a role-play program in the form of a board game, they
indirectly experienced the differences in privileges and discrimination of
religious groups.
The
board game is a summary of various events in life, and is designed to have
different results depending on whether the participant belongs to a major
religious team or a minor religious team. All of these events were produced
based on real events, and the participants were surprised to learn that the
events that felt unrealistic and absurd were real cases of religious
discrimination.
The participants shared
their experiences and lessons learned from being in those positions through
interviews and times of sharing in the game.
Ven.
Nam Koe, a student monk at Pannasastra University of Cambodia, said,
“When
we were playing the game, we realized that some religions are very privileged
and other religions are less privileged, which refers to the majority and
minority.
Because
of that, the idea of combined and divided between the majority and minority
groups, sometimes the conflict can occur between those two. So in other groups,
when we go in to discuss these parts, we can recognize that we are from the
privileged. the privileged religion should give opportunity to the less
privileged religion to join and discuss together in order to find peace in the
world.”
On the second day, a
discussion was held on the causes and solutions of disputes.
Based on the actual case
of the conflict in Mindanao, the participants analyzed what
the biggest causes of conflict were, and discussed what kind of effort should
be made to resolve these disputes and conflicts as a religious person and bring
peace.
After
the discussion, as an example of the effort to resolve conflict, they watched
the video of HWPL's drawing up a private-level peace agreement in
Mindanao and the peace activities that continued to be done so that peace could
be established in Mindanao after that. The participants expressed their
surprise at the achievements of peace activities at the private level.
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