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Eugene Peace Week Continues Through Sunday

Angela Kellner

This is Peace Week in Eugene. Volunteers and organizations are holding events through Sunday to help promote peace.

Volunteers with the Eugene Peace Team set up their booth in downtown Eugene this week to talk with people about peace. Volunteer Julia Siporin is a yoga instructor and a representative for Words of Peace Global.

Siporin: “Peace is a fundamental right. All people deserve to have peace, to enjoy peace. And if we practice peace we can change our world.”

Siporin has been volunteering all week to help promote Peace Week.

Siporin: “It’s being approached through spoken word, art, dance, music, video events, documentaries. How can we get people to lay the arms down that are promoting war? And how can we promote inner peace?”

Eugene Peace Week is volunteer-driven and was started by this guy.

Hazen: “My name is David Hazen. I call myself the imaginer of the Eugene Peace Team. I’ve been working on this project since 2009.”

Credit Angela Kellner
Eugene Peace Team Imagineer David Hazen.

Hazen agrees peace means different things to different people, but he’s hoping in whatever form it takes, that it spreads.

Hazen: “I’m a firm believer that what we do in our personal lives, and how we treat our fellow brothers and sisters, is contagious. And the better we do that, the more we learn about how to communicate, how to listen, how to accept other people, that starts to spread.”

In 2010, Hazen says he gathered with about ten friends for a moment of silence on the International Day of Peace, September 21st. Since then, the Eugene Peace Team has grown, something Hazen says is magical to witness.

Hazen: “Because I believe that peace is going to come from the grassroots. Eventually they will come to the point where we will say to national armies: We don’t need you. Which would be very radical. (laughs)”

Information about Peace Week events is on their website: Eugene Peace Team.