 December 2001/ January 2002
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
2002 Hiroshima Flame Walk Louise Dunlap, affordable housing activist and member of the Cambridge MA Peace Commission, has participated in over a dozen walks with Nipponzan Myohoji in the past decade and has written about many of them for Peacework. When I heard that fires still smolder in the rubble of the twin towers, I thought immediately of the first "ground zero," the terror of Hiroshima. Those fires, too, burned for a long time. One of them is still burning and will soon, quite literally, come home to the United States. In 1945, Mr. Yamamoto visited the site of his uncle's house in Hiroshima where the blast had destroyed his family. Full of anger and hate, he collected embers from the fires and carried them home to his village. His grandmother, so the story goes, kindled a flame from these embers to illuminate the family's Buddhist altar and tended it over the years in a spirit of love and compassion. As the flame burned on, Mr. Yamamato experienced a transformation. The Hiroshima flame no longer fed his anger but came to stand for compassion and world peace. Embers of this same fire have now lit the Peace Monument Flame in his village of Hoshino and other shrines throughout Japan.
The itinerary is a powerful history lesson: Late January--Hanford AFB in Yakima WA where 40 billion gallons of radioactive waste has polluted even the tumbleweeds*; mid-February--nuclear research centers in the San Francisco Bay area; mid-March--Nevada Test site followed by Big Mountain, AZ where Hopi and Navajo people have borne the brunt of uranium mining; mid-April--Oakridge,TN followed by a walk up the east coast past Lockheed Martin installations in MD, PA, and NJ. All of us are invited to arrange our schedules so we can join for short or longer segments of this walk.
*The walk's useful website <www.dharmawalk.org >
gives this figure along with walk route, contact information,
and supplemental reading. 
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