Peace Birds DC is an project that will be part of Figment DC, a seriously cool community art festival that will be held at Section E of Anacostia Park on Saturday and Sunday, September 28-29, 2013. Figment started in New York City a few years ago. Since then, this great idea has spread around the country and the world; and it’s come to DC. You can learn more about Figment DC here:  http://dc.figmentproject.org/

Section E has a roller skating rink, and a nature center, and a cool map of the United States. The Peace Birds project will be in and around this lovely Gazebo.

The Gazebo is near the map, so you can walk from the Atlantic to the Pacific with a bird. But it’s not near the skating rink, so you can’t roller skate across the country.

So why would you want to be part of Peace Birds? To have fun & make friends. Of course!

Who is invited to be part of Peace Birds?  People — young, old, and in-between. Anyone & everyone is welcome to take part.

What will they be doing? Making origami paper cranes — Lots & lots of them. We hope to have 1000 (or more) cranes by Sunday night. Also putting the cranes on strings. And some other fun stuff too.

A Thousand Cranes! That is a lot of cranes, but with enough people, we can do it. Besides, there’s a really good reason for making that number of cranes. And a sad, but lovely, story to explain it.

In August, 1945, the US dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The damage and death was horrific, but the bomb did bring an end to World War II. It also left radioactive fallout; and a few years later many children in Hiroshima developed leukemia. One of those children was a girl named Sadako Sasaki.

Sadako was two when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Fortunately, her family survived. Sadako, was healthy and happy until she was 12, when she developed leukemia. When she was in the hospital, her father told her about the Japanese legend that if someone fold a thousand cranes, their wish will come true. Sadako started folding cranes, hoping that her wish to get better would come true. She used whatever paper she could find, including wrapping paper from get well gifts and medicine bottle wrappers.

Though Sadako  folded more than a thousand origami cranes, she died in October, 1955. Later, Sadako’s classmates helped raise funds to build this memorial to her and to all the other children who died as a result of the bombing.

Sadako’s hope and courage has inspired many others and origami cranes have become a symbol of peace. Today, people from all over the world send long strings of cranes to the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima.

At Figment DC, we’ll be folding cranes to send to Japan. Like Sadako, we’ll be recycling paper to make our cranes, cutting squares of paper from magazines, outdated maps, old wrapping paper, whatever we can find, and whatever you choose to bring.  For younger children, we’ll have some cranes and easier-to-fold birds, as well as stickers and markers to decorate them. And we’ll have some people putting the birds on strings.