On September 21, the district of Horta-Guinardó in Barcelona commemorated this year’s International Day of Peace, by organizing a full day of cultural activities at the district’s Hiroshima Gardens to express the community’s desire for peace and rejection of violence. The event included speeches of public authorities, presentation of a mural painting, performance of poetry and an origami workshop for children on how to make paper cranes.
Children learned the story of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who was exposed to radiation from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and died of leukemia at the age 12 after spending a significant amount of time in a hospital. Inspired by the Japanese “senbazuru” legend, Sadako began making origami cranes in the hospital with the goal of making one thousand cranes.
The Hiroshima Garden was flooded with paper cranes in tribute to all victims of war and especially to all the people who lost their lives during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hoping that nothing like this will ever happen again anywhere in the world.
A variety of schools, youth centers and other citizens’ groups of the Horta-Guinardó neighborhood were involved in this initiative.
>The report in Catalan on the Catalan Chapter of Mayors for Peace website
(Photos courtesy of Catalan Chapter of Mayors for Peace)