Boy Dolls at Chautauqua

The ten dolls pictured above are ones I turned in today to Susan McKee, the founder of Women4Women_Knitting4Peace.   Susan had the audacious idea a few years ago that knitting might promote peace -- as she envisioned, "one stitch at a time."

In 2004, Susan remembers, Sister Joan Chittister was a speaker at Chautauqua.  Sister Joan asserted that peace will never happen until women get involved in dramatic new ways.  I heard Sister Joan also, and found her interesting.  Susan found her words transformative.

That year Susan was knitting a prayer shawl for a friend. She thought about knitting prayer shawls for women she didn't know, women trapped in conflict areas. From that thought Women4Women_Knitting4Peace was born, formalized in 2006.

Before I met Susan I came across a woman at a Chautauqua event who was knitting while waiting for the event to start. She was making Peace Pal dolls, she said. Hmmm... I had once made a lumpy sweater, and so I knew how to knit, sort of  The little dolls looked easier than a sweater, so I decided to give it a go.

The little dolls and other handmade items usually get into the hands of children in far-away places through the auspices of medical missionaries and others with personal connections. Last year some of them went to a school in Rwanda.  The children there had been orphaned by barbarous conflict. And the students in this particular school were all deaf. About 15 percent of the students had an additional crushing burden:  they were labeled CHH, responsible for "Child-Headed Household."

How important is a doll to a child with such burdens?  Hard to say. But Susan has found that the Peace Pals are important to the medical missionaries and others who carry them.  Regretting that they  cannot meet all the needs they encounter, they  are happy to see that they can bring joy to a child who gets to pick out his very own Peace Pal.

As Susan says on the website www.knitting4peace.org , "We are crafting peace and justice one stitch at a time. Committed to the well-being of women and children we may never meet, we plant seeds of hope for a future we may never see."

In just six years the program has reached 45 countries. The website says that 21,586 items have been produced. With my contribution, delivered today, that number goes up to 21,596.