(Oct 22, 2022) Jon Caplan organized our Club’s participation in the Model UN Peace Conference at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School, 9-4:30 on Oct 22. This was a Rotary Global Grant Peace Educational Project promoted by District Governor-Elect Makiko Nakasone (Glendale Noon Rotary Club) and supported by 9 Rotary Clubs in our District 5280 and District 2750 in Japan.
Student participants came from 6 High Schools in the South Bay area, as future peacebuilders to learn about conflict resolution and the importance of nuclear disarmament to prevent a future disastrous global catastrophe from miscalculation and misunderstandings. They listened to inspiring presentations from a Hiroshima Atomic Bomb survivor, fugitives from the war in Ukraine, and (by Zoom) an Afghanistan inhabitant, and they learned how Peer Mediation can work to avoid conflict. There was a tree-planting ceremony on the High School grounds of a ginkgo sapling, grown from seeds of a tree in Hiroshima that had been blackened by the bomb radiation, but began leafing out again the next year as an inspiring illustration of new growth and renewal; these are being planted all over the world now as a symbol of peace and reconciliation.
High School display of youth who have survived brutal conflict in the world
Ukraine refugees Oksana Zayachkivska and Ihor Kukhlevsky
Howard Kakita, 90-year-old Hiroshima A-Bomb survivor (near ground zero)
Tree-planting of Hiroshima Survivor ginkgo tree descendant at PV Peninsula HS, with Japanese Rotarian, PV Sunsetters Jon Caplan & Victoria Perez-Thacker, and Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi