Peaceful Relations

When I was in Standard 2 at primary school we had Bible Study classes for two hours every week. The first time, a few students went away to another room and the rest of us were ushered down to sit on the mat. A very smiley woman named Mrs Brown came and perched her ample backside on one of our tiny chairs and told us stories about Jesus. I don't remember any of the stories, but I do remember singing a song about how "Jesus is the apple of my eye, and that's why I'm bananas for the Lord".

Afterwards, one of my friends told me that instead of Bible Study, all I had to do was tell my mother to write a note to the teacher and I could go to "Peaceful Relations" with her instead. That night, I made my mother write the note. The first week I went to Peaceful Relations I spent the time making stuff out of clay. I made some very cute miniature clay hamburgers, some very cute miniature clay mushrooms, and a couple of little miniature clay scroll/parchment things with styluses for writing. I think these things were popular at the time. The adults supervising us were people I'd never met before, but were all very nice, calm and quiet and perhaps slightly hippy types.

The next week, I made a few more hamburgers, mushrooms and parchments and uplifted the ones from the previous week which were now fully dry and hardened. Then I went outside where some of the supervisors had strung up a whole lot of cargo nets between the trees next to the tennis courts for us to play on. We mucked around down there for a while, and also got to play with someone's absolutely enormous St Bernard.

The following week, we walked down to a nearby beach to extract some more clay. I'm pretty sure the supervisors were telling us lots of very interesting information about various trees and things that we passed, but I don't remember any of it. There couldn't have been more than about 30 students in total in Peaceful Relations, all primary school age, out of several hundred students in my school. The numbers grew by a few every week though, although I suspect the majority of students still ended up in Bible Studies.

I'm not sure how long this went on for, I think it was probably just a month or two during the warmer weather. And in hindsight, I do wonder if the people who came in to supervise us had larger intentions that just letting us climb trees and make clay mushrooms. I do seem to recall them occasionally trying to engage us in conversation - I vaguely recall some discussion of Greenpeace and the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. Perhaps they had better luck with the older children.

All that has stuck with me is that you have to choose between Bible Studies and Peaceful Relations, and Peaceful Relations is infinitely cooler. And clay hamburgers are cute.