A Bay Area–based initiative has achieved its goal of giving puppets to children in the Middle East traumatized by last summer’s war between Israel and Hamas.
Peace Puppets, a project started by Robin Fletcher of Oakland and Irit Weir of Napa, recently handed out puppets to 50 first-graders and 38 preschoolers in Sderot, a southern Israeli city often targeted by Hamas rockets.
And on Dec. 10, a cargo container with 731 boxes of clothing and other items, including 200 puppets, will arrive in Israel and then Gaza, Weir reported.
“There is lots of excitement with the process of receiving a sweet, fluffy object,” Weir said in an email. “The kids can’t really articulate or feel comfortable expressing fear, and lots of those emotions are being internalized with symptoms. I spent some time with the principal, who said that … kids, for the most part, have shut down.”
The puppets reduce anxieties and help kids express their feelings, Weir said.
Peace Puppets was started in August in the wake of the war. The project set out to collect more than 1,000 hand and finger puppets — homemade or store-bought — and then undertake the difficult process of distributing them.
For more information, visit www.peacepuppets.org or send an email to [email protected].