SAKALA's Tom and Jerry Peace Ambassadors

News for a Better World from the SAKALA community center in Cité Soleil

One of the things I love about coming to SAKALA is that the children here remind me that you can find peace anywhere.

Planting a beautiful garden. 

Enjoying a good meal with good friends. 

Watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Wait, what was that last one?

I’m not sure if the Tom and Jerry cartoon – featuring the fantastically violent cat and mouse – is known the world over. I suspect it is, judging by the number of languages it is translated into.

Not that there is much to translate beyond slapstick comedy, which apparently, judging by the kids’ laughter at Tom and Jerry’s antics, is a universal language.

I was first introduced to the Tom and Jerry peace effect a few years ago.

I was trying to encourage the kids to follow along a yoga video with me as a way to deal with the stress and trauma in their lives — because unfortunately they have way too much of both growing up in Cité Soleil, a strong community, but also one of the most impoverished and underserved in Haiti.

Peace is not normally associated with Tom and Jerry and yoga is undoubtedly a more obviously zen practice than a cat and mouse wielding sledgehammers.

But we can’t always predict where our peacemakers will come from.

That oh-so-peaceful yoga video a few years ago was really popular for about five minutes.

Then the kids quickly questioned why I was using my great good fortune at having a phone for this yoga thing when we could be watching Tom and Jerry cartoons.

I was surprised kids still watched Tom and Jerry, as it was something that was around during the Medieval times otherwise known as my childhood years.

But I struck a deal with them that day that if they finished the yoga video with me they could watch Tom and Jerry afterwards.

And while I still much prefer yoga personally, it did not really catch on with the kids (at least not yet). Nobody has since asked me to load up a yoga video.

But Tom and Jerry? Well, sometimes I think that has become my name (pronounced as one word Tomanjerry). I am fine with this.

The happy accident of finding the joy in Tom and Jerry came with the simple act of sharing my phone. It started with me holding the phone and the kids gathered around me to watch the cartoon.

But I really took up too much viewing space and the actual watching of Tom and Jerry is not as much of a treat for me anyway. So I designated leaders among the kids who would take care of the phone for me as I stood near by. Eventually, I would leave for a while so they knew I trusted them.

Invariably, more children would want to watch Tom and Jerry (and, later, other cartoons) than I thought could possibly be accommodated by my phone’s tiny screen. I come from the US where people so often have one phone all to themselves. Two people, maybe, rarely, three people, might watch a YouTube video together on a phone. But it is hard to imagine more than this.

So when I would see four, five, six (and more) children wanting to watch I worried that I had started something that would backfire into something negative.

This was a failure of my imagination, not the children’s.

Take, for example, the latest Tom and Jerry showing a few days ago in the garden at SAKALA.

It started like this:

But quickly grew to this (and, yes, the phone and Tom and Jerry are in the middle of all those kids, and, no, this is not even their world record for most kids sharing a phone):

The miracle for me, every time, is watching how they figure out how to arrange themselves so everyone has a chance to see. It is like watching a game of Twister played out on multiple dimensions.

It is not always immediately and completely peaceful — there might be a minor shove here and there or an irritated glance in the jockeying for position.

The littlest children might at first find themselves bewildered on the outside, unable to see. But invariably one of the older children will gently bring them into the fold, having them sit on their lap or otherwise finding a prime viewing spot for them.

They take a tiny but precious-to-them resource and manage to multiply it almost infinitely.

I still am always on guard for needing to break things up in case they get out of hand. But I have learned to counsel myself to just wait a moment for them to work disagreements out in their own way for the common good. They have not failed yet.

Which is why I wish I could bottle their Tom and Jerry peace process for the rest of Haiti — which is experiencing extreme levels of political instability and violence right now —and indeed for the whole world.

It is fitting that the young peacemakers developed this at SAKALA, which in Haitian Creole stands for the Community Center for Peaceful Alternatives.

I have wanted to write about this quiet everyday miracle at SAKALA before. But I hesitated because I did not want the message to be interpreted as “oh, these poor children have to huddle around a phone.”

The poverty and hardship these children live with is, absolutely, a terrible injustice — one SAKALA and the children themselves fight every day.

But this miracle around the Tom and Jerry phone — this sometimes messy gathering to share a limited resource for the common good — is not something to be pitied. It is absolutely a show of strength, imagination, and kindness that we would all do well to develop in ourselves.

I am not sure how great a student I am — but I know for sure they are great teachers.

Wishing you much peace, happiness, and health and sending our great thanks for your solidarity and kindness to SAKALA!