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Souls United The Hiroshima Flame Interfaith Pilgrimage that will set out Tuesday from Seattle will be a demonstration for peace and nuclear disarmament with a side message about the harm nuclear development has done to native Americans and the environment.
A Honolulu girl joins an interfaith
peace march across the mainland to
call attentionto the heavy human
costs of the nuclear ageBy Mary Adamski
madamski@starbulletin.comFor 15-year-old Annie Elfing of Kailua, it will also be a continuing series of homework assignments as she lives out the second semester of her freshman year on foot daily with other peace pilgrims heading across country for New York.
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Elfing became interested in the pilgrimage after meeting Jun Yasuda, a Buddhist nun, and others in an ecumenical group from Japan who observed the Dec. 7 anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack with a silent vigil and four-day fast outside the gates of the Arizona Memorial."I really liked Jun-San and her ideas on peace," Elfing said. "My mom and I were talking on the way to school one day, and I said I'd like to join the walk."
Since Mom, Gabrielle Welford, is a peace activist herself - a member of the American Friends Service Committee who lived in several countries as a child - that idea did not meet the instant death it would have in most daughter-mother conversations.
And it helped that Elfing attends the private Waldorf High School, which aims to help its students meet their desire "to find meaning in life, to find human relationships and a sense of connectedness to the world, and to feel that he/she can make a difference in the world."
So, in the month since meeting the Japanese contingent, Elfing has prepared for the semester ahead by breaking in new hiking boots on longer and longer walks - she and brother Tolemy, 12, peaked with a march from the Pali Lookout to Makiki.
She bought some warm clothes and "blister stuff" for her heels and, as one of the first messages on her new Web site, asked for the loan of waterproof clothes. And she has sought financial help from family and friends: "I'm really amazed at all the support I'm getting."
"One person I know gave her $100," said Welford. "He said he feels he missed chances in life because he didn't take risks."
The self-assured teenager said she expects to "become smarter and more experienced in life. I like talking to people and hearing about them. I'm a little scared - the longest I was ever away from home was a month I spent on Kauai."
Elfing is not connected to any church or particular belief system. "For a while I was into Buddhism. I read a lot of books on it," she said. "I believe you should be a good person when you're alive; then it will be all right when you die."
She shaved her head a couple of months ago, but it wasn't as much in imitation of the Buddhist nun whom she admires as it was a whim inspired by a girlfriend and boredom, she said.
Perhaps unconsciously, she has assimilated a family Quaker pacifist belief. Her mother and aunt, children of Quaker parents, are activists. She's joined her mother at the peace vigil staged each Friday since Sept. 11 outside the Kuhio Federal Building. She expects aunt Jane Welford, who advocates for the homeless in Berkeley, to join her for a few days of the march through California. Indeed, sounding envious of the trip, Gabrielle Welford is talking about joining her daughter during spring break at the University of Hawaii, where she teaches English composition.
Mother and daughter met last Tuesday with Waldorf teacher Nigel Lumsden to discuss what the faculty set as her homework. "One of her loves is writing, and that will work out since she must make the journey into a journal," Lumsden said. She will carry a laptop computer and digital camera to meet the assignment of a weekly report on the Web site. "She will be required to do book reports, keep up with the required reading," he said. The list includes "Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson, "47 Ronan" by John Allyn, "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway and "And There Was Light" by Jacques Lusseyran.
"Math is difficult to do on the road. She'll need to take it in summer school," Lumsden said. "My parting words were, 'We expect to see you here next semester.'"
Welford admits to some worry about her daughter's adventure, but she's been reassured by the planning of the Hiroshima Flame Interfaith Pilgrimage, which leaders describe as "not a political statement, but a spiritual act of walking in prayer, a pilgrimage."
A variety of churches and organizations will provide housing and support across the country. There will be about 40 people in the march on any given day, with additional supporters expected to join them when they reach particular sites.
They will walk in some significant locations - about 15 miles per day, a total of 1,000 miles by the time they reach Ground Zero in New York City. But they will also be transported over some long hauls, and their possessions will be carried in support vehicles, not on their backs.
Vigils will be staged outside nuclear sites along the way, starting with a Jan. 31 stop at a Hanford, Wash., research facility. In March they will stand at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., headquarters for the Star Wars national missile defense system, which has been resurrected by the Bush administration and is a particular target of the pilgrimage. Other stops will be the Los Alamos, N.M., research site where the first atomic bombs were developed, and Oakridge, Tenn., where the Hiroshima bomb was built.
Central to the interfaith pilgrimage is the "Hiroshima flame," which the walkers will carry in a lanternlike holder. It was kindled from the flame at a peace monument in the village of Hoshino, Japan, which reportedly can be traced to embers collected after the Hiroshima bombing in 1945 and initially held on a family's Buddhist altar.
Information on the 2002 Hiroshima Flame Interfaith Pilgrimage can be found at www. dharmawalk.org, and the island girl's experiences will be chronicled at anniewalk.4dw.com.
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