Boy, schoolmates share lesson in peace

BELLEVUE
By Christine Dubois

Students at Sacred Heart School in Bellevue sent a wish for peace to the other side of the world--in the form of a thousand folded paper cranes.

"I like making cranes," says 8-year-old Timmy O'Brien, the third-grader who spearheaded the project. "I can do one in one minute and five seconds."

O’Brien and his stepmother, Sayoko Kuwahara, delivered the cranes to the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, Japan, on April 1. On Friday, April 25 they shared photos of their adventure with O’Brien’s classmates. 

It all started when O’Brien’s teacher handed out "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes." The story tells of Sadako Sasaki, a young Japanese girl who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, only to die of leukemia brought on by the radiation. Before her death, Sadako folded one thousand paper cranes, a gesture she hoped would grant her wish to be cured.

Today Sadako is an international symbol of peace. People from around the world bring cranes to hang below her statue at the Peace Child Monument in Hiroshima.

Never one who's been much for reading, O’Brien flipped to the back of the book and spied directions for turning a square of paper into a paper crane in 24 steps. He tore a sheet of paper out of his notebook and began folding.

That night, his stepmother found three paper cranes on her desk. The next day, she found three even smaller cranes. The third day, they were joined by three more so tiny she needed tweezers to pick them up.

"Who made these?" she asked.

"I made them," O’Brien said.

"Who taught you?"

"I taught myself," he said

Kuwahara, who spent the first 20 years of her life in Japan, was impressed. She'd been planning to take her stepson to Japan to meet her parents and learn about her native land. They decided to make 1,000 cranes to take to Hiroshima. 

Soon O’Brien was teaching his teachers and classmates to make cranes, too. The fourth and seventh graders pitched in. The math specialist taught her students. Two-and-a-half weeks later, the students had produced 1,000 cranes. O’Brien and Kuwahara strung them into 40 long chains. 

Father Patrick Ritter, pastor of Sacred Heart Church, blessed the cranes at a school liturgy on March 20.  Vice-principal Connie Gray says the project captured the students' imagination.

"One person, like Sadako, can make a difference," she notes. "That's a big part of what we do as a school, to encourage students to make a difference where they can."

In Japan, O’Brien rode a rickshaw and a bullet train, visited a 300-year-old Ninja House and a 13th century temple, and learned to slurp Japanese noodles.

But the highlight of the trip was his visit with his stepmother to Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, with its museum and monuments. They met a survivor of the bombing, studied a model of the city before and after the bomb fell and marveled at the tiny cranes Sadako produced, now on display at the museum.

At the Peace Child Monument, O’Brien was amazed to see large glass cases full of thousands of brightly colored cranes, each collection with a ribbon saying where in the world it had come from.  A wish from the children of Japan was inscribed at the base of the monument: "This is our cry/This is our prayer/ Peace in the World."

O’Brien hung the cranes made by students of Sacred Heart School. "I was proud," he said.

His stepmother said she cried, touched with a vision of hope for the future.

"I wasn't alive when World War II was going on, but I heard plenty of stories from my parents," said Kuwahara, who works as a Japanese market approval consultant for medical devices. "Back then, it was impossible for a Japanese person and an American to be together. Now the relationship between Japan and America is different.

“That gave me a vision that what seems impossible today, like the relationship between the industrialized world and the Middle East, may be possible in the near future,” she said. "I really hope more people have that vision, rather than being caught up in what it is today."

O’Brien expressed it with the straight forward manner of an eight year old: "I learned about how a lot of people died from the bomb," he says. "So we shouldn't kill."