Sowing seeds of diversity

NAPA

Deep in the foothills of the Napa Valley, amid the bucolic meadows and towering redwoods, scores of schoolchildren are learning about respect, tolerance and the Peanut Butter Booger River.

This is, after all, a program geared toward 10-year-olds and Lara Mendel, director of the Berkeley-based Mosaic Project, is perfectly prepared to throw in a few snot references if it helps turn children into peacemakers.

By next spring, nearly 1,500 children will have gone through the week-long tolerance and diversity program, which recently won the Agape Foundation's Rising Peacemaker Prize. But the Mosaic Project has been Mendel's dream ever since she attended a similar program as a Southern California teen-ager.

"Even at 15, I thought, 'This is too late,'" she said. "I wanted to do this before prejudice and hatred became ingrained. In four nights and five days, you can change a person's life."

Two decades later, the Mosaic Project is rapidly expanding reality. Founded by Mendel and Stanford classmate Gogi Hodder, Mosaic welcomed its first school groups in 2002. This year, some 700 youngsters are expected, including fifth graders from Concord's Cambridge Elementary, Berkeley's Malcolm X and San Francisco's Community School who filled the encampment last week, thanks to fund-raising efforts by both schoolchildren and Mosaic supporters

There were campfires, night hikes and plenty of nature, but this is no "camp," said Mendel. "Kumbaya" has been replaced with songs such as "Empathy," "I Statements" and a dozen others that promote the tolerance-building mission of this outdoor school. For five days, children from vastly different economic and ethnic spheres eat together, sleep together and forge friendships.

"It's hard to learn about diversity if everyone's the same," said Mosaic board member Mark Breimhorst, who said that diversity extends to the Mosaic staff.

Counselors hail from Malawi, Mexico, and beyond.

"The adult leaders model everything. That's the thing that underlies everything," said Laurie Senter, a fifth-grade teacher at Cambridge, where 84 percent of the students are Latino. "It's a chance to talk to kids from different schools, different races, different ways of living."

Instead of the usual, schoolyard scene, a new Mexican immigrant from Concord rubs shoulders with a well-to-do young San Franciscan whose favorite CD is a Mayan recording picked up on a family vacation to Cancun. There are African-Americans, Asians, Latinos and whites.

There are even people from the future.

These mythical characters appeared the first morning, unable to communicate, and adorned in monochromatic grays to symbolize a grim future world, said Breimhorst. Each evening, the children reviewed what they learned during the day -- tolerance, communication, assertiveness -- and altered that future.

By Thursday morning, the "future people" were more colorfully dressed but their communication quickly degenerated into chaos. Children watched carefully, then headed off to "Conflict Resolution College" for lessons on peacemaking and repairing relationships.

But it wasn't all deep, philosophical discussions. There were games and challenges, like the memorable group crossing of the Peanutbutterboogerfiresnot River. And there was music, written by Brett Dennen -- Mosaic's "resident rock star," said Mendel -- and sung amidst the trees, perched atop the camp's startling geodesic dome or out on the ball field.

"A lot of times (schools) find us through our music," said Mendel.

On Thursday, the sound of singing and infectious clapping emanated from a small meadow where a circle of youngsters gazed adoringly at Columbia University junior Chris Darby and shared feelings. It was an exercise in "I statements," a conflict resolution technique used to express emotion about someone else's behavior, usually phrased as "I feel (angry, happy, proud, etc.) when you ... because ..." Darby's version, accompanied by syncopated claps, was infectiously cheery.

"Gonna use my I-Statements some, gonna use my I-Statements some," he sang. "I feel -- ."

He beamed encouragingly at a small girl on his left.

"Happy," she said softly.

"When --" the group prompted with a rhythmic clap.

"I'm with my friends..." she continued.

"Oh yeah, that's happy," Darby said. "Because...?"

Reporter Jackie Burrell covers K-12 education. Contact her at 925-977-8568 or jburrell@cctimes.com.