Session One - 15 August 1999

15 August- Our first speech

"Our second day in Haifa was indeed an active day, first in the morning we went back to our ship to attend the official welcoming ceremony. We were welcome by the scout and a group of VIP. We introduced ourselves names and countries and we welcomed everybody to see our Black Knight. After that we went to sightsee the beautiful city of Haifa especially Bahai's temple.

After lunch there was the seminar about the non violence education in Colombia, then we had our meeting with the Mayor of Haifa, Mr. Amram Miznaa, and we had our first official speech as the Peace Sailors:

Imagine a world without conflict, wars, weapons and people dying. Imagine a world where everyone can be different and live in peace…this is the world we are dreaming of.

We are the peace sailors, sailors because sailing is working with the wind and the sea, peace sailors because only living in peace we can be creative and happy.

We are young people coming from all around the Mediterranean, from Greece, Italy, Spain, Israel, Jordan, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Morocco, Algeria, Palestine, Egypt, Slovenia, France, Germany, Switzerland and Poland.

We put our dreams for a better world on a boat, the Zawisza Czarny-the Black Knight, to carry on our peace message wherever we go. Our message, starting from Alexandria, didn't succeed to arrive to Gaza, and this showed us that there's a great gap between dreams and reality…but this is not going to stopping us from carrying on our mission.

Nevertheless Larnaca is going to be our next stop and we will pass the message of peace to our friends, the next peace sailors. From Larnaca our message is going to travel to Beirut, Antalya, Istambul, Salonica, Piraeus and everywhere in the world where young people like us share the same dreams for the future and where people like you believe in us and support us.

After the meeting we had a good barbecue on the beach with our Israeli sea scout friends."

Haifa City Hall : Nisreen (Al-Hassan Youth Award, Jordan) and Antonios (Soma Hellinon Proskopon, Greece) deliver the message of Peace and Hope from the Peace Sailors.