A group gathered at McKelvie Road housing in Lamlash on Sunday afternoon with the aim of learning how to make origami peace cranes. Aided by tea and biscuits and the enthusiasm of lead crane maker Alison Page, the group met to contribute to a project being co-ordinated by the Edinburgh Peace and Justice Centre. The Peace and Justice Centre is encouraging communities to support the project by holding workshops in their local areas. They have a target of 140,000 folded paper cranes for the latter half of 2019, with a plan to create a huge exhibition to remember the people who died in the bombing of Hiroshima.
The Peace and Justice Centre write, ‘In November we received several large boxes from Japan containing over 50,000 origami cranes bringing the total number of cranes contributed to the project to 70,000, halfway to our goal of 140,000. We hope this will inspire more people to make cranes. Origami cranes represent peace because of a girl called Sadako who was two years old living in Hiroshima at the time of the bomb. When she developed leukaemia at age ten Sadako heard that by making 1,000 origami cranes you get a wish. She wished for peace. When she died her friends continued to make paper cranes and since then people have been making them as a symbol of hope for nuclear disarmament and peace. Each of the 140,000 origami cranes in our project will represent one person who died at Hiroshima at the time of or as a consequence of the initial blast’.
The organisation ICAN, (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in setting up the UN Nuclear Ban Treaty is also supporting the project. The Peace and Justice Centre report that, ‘The Cranes project is raising awareness of the Ban Treaty – the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons – to rid the world of the threat that these weapons pose to us all. The Cranes project is our main contribution to the global movement. And ICAN is now doing a 1,000 Cranes project inviting people to make an origami Crane, take their photo with the crane and post it on Facebook or Instagram. You can add a message, and then link your post pack to http://nuclearban.org/1000cranes
‘The final exhibition will tell the story of nuclear weapons, the movements to eliminate them, the Ban Treaty, and of these workshops. When you send us cranes please include a little text about the workshop – date and place and who took part – and include photos and short videos of workshop participants talking about their hopes for peace and disarmament’.
For more information about it, and other work of the Edinburgh Peace and Justice centre, follow this link.
Origami crane workshops take place once a month in Edinburgh, and future meetings in Arran will be listed here at the Voice.
