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“This PeaceJam is amazing,” my friend said. “I was just hearing about them on Colorado Public Radio.”
She’d been hearing about them from me for months — since last November, when I interviewed founders Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, and wrote about how PeaceJam would mark its tenth anniversary by soon bringing the largest gathering of Nobel Peace Prize winners outside of Oslo — ever — to Denver. (“A Peace of the Action,” November 20, 2005).
Soon is upon us: On September 15, the Peace Prize laureates will gather at the University of Denver, where they’ll work with 3,000 kids from around the globe, then issue a global call to action — a ten-year plan designed to bring about peace. And they’re just the people to do it.
And Engle and Suvanjieff are the people who’ve made it possible. For the past year, the couple and their loyal crew at PeaceJam world headquarters — in Arvada! — have been have been scrambling to bring everything together, to accommodate the political peculiarities of the Nobels (many rate head-of-state security levels), to scrape together donations to bring get PeaceJammers here, to get people to truly understand what they are doing.
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“Now I know why you keep talking about these guys,” my friend continued. “Denver should really pay attention.”
Yes, we should. Give PeaceJam a chance tonight, when Engle and Suvanjieff appear on Colorado Inside Out, at 8 p.m. on Channel 12. — Patricia Calhoun
