Peace Walkers bring anti-nuclear message to Ocean City

Last Updated on Tuesday, March 26, 2013 02:49 pm Written by Cindy Nevitt Thursday, March 21, 2013 01:10 am

Group to next meet community at senior center

Cindy Nevitt / Ordained nuns Clair Carter, left, and Jun Yasuda, with Mary Beth Campion, who is making her first Massachusetts-to-Washington, D.C., peace walk this year, spent the first evening of two in Ocean City at a potluck dinner held at the Bayside Center.

OCEAN CITY – Jun San Yasuda has been walking for peace since 1978. So has Clair Carter. Yet neither of the ordained nuns knows how many miles they’ve covered in the last 35 years.

“I never counted,” said Jun as she enjoyed a potluck dinner and the company of about 20 supporters Wednesday evening at the Bayside Center on the first night of a two-day stopover in town. “This is prayer, not counting.”

“Walking is for thinking,” Carter said. 

The two women, Buddhist monastic Peace Walkers who left the New England Peace Pagoda in Leverett, Mass., on Feb. 15 on a journey that will end April 5 in Washington, D.C., will be available to meet the community 6 p.m. Thursday at the Howard S. Stainton Senior Center at 1735 Simpson Ave. The walkers, who are between protests at Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lacey Township, Ocean County, and Salem Nuclear Generating Station in Hancock’s Bridge, Salem County, will give eye witness to the dangers of nuclear power as experienced during the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, caused by the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Jun, whose mother still lives in Japan, has visited the area twice in the last two years.

Oyster Creek, the country’s oldest nuclear plant in operation since December 1969, has the same design as Fukushima’s. The Japanese disaster, which affected 160,000 people in a nuclear meltdown that released radioactive materials, is the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

Mary Beth Campion, a resident of Delaware who first started walking shorter portions of the walk five years ago, is participating in the entire walk this year for the first time.

The group’s destination is Washington, D.C., where they will visit the graves of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, and the memorial of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Campion said the group admires JFK for attempting to end the Cold War, a peaceful act, at the time of his assassination 50 years ago.

Originally attracted to the Peace Walkers’ mission of appreciating the earth as a living entity as opposed to humanity’s habit of exploiting it, Campion said she has become “more sensitized to the nuclear threat” and was “shocked to learn the U.S. is poisoning South Dakota land with open-pit uranium mines” that she said are emitting more than four times the radiation as the evacuated Fukushima plant.

“These guys have a really special energy, really peaceful,” Campion said of the nuns leading the group, which numbers about 10 as it passes through Ocean City. “That’s the energy they bring. They have a way of approaching things that opens a crack or a wedge into the consciousness, creating a little gap that introduces the possibility of change.”

“Creating peace is the most highest goal,” said Jun, who has walked for peace in Nicaragua, Germany, France, Poland, Nepal and Korea. “Creating peace means trusting people, creating peace means not being afraid. This is not easy for everybody.”

Often, the Peace Walkers do not know where they will find their next meal or where they will spend the night. “That is part of the appreciation,” Jun said. “We become more humble. Sometimes, no food gives us more appreciation when we have food.”

The same for shelter. Jun recounted how, through the years, the group has been invited into a school bus driver’s home in Boston; a farmhouse in Montreal, Canada, during a Christmas snowstorm; and a German restaurant to partake of trays of food on days when they did not have housing arrangements.

The colder the weather, she said, the warmer the welcome the walkers receive. “They see our sacrifice and they watch our struggle,” she said. “They open up their hearts.”

Carter, a native of Boston, said the group’s first trip to Ocean City had impressed the walkers. “The vibration, the atmosphere of this island is so calm,” she said.

The Peace Walkers will wrap up their stay in Ocean City on Friday morning when they are shuttled to the Salem nuclear plant to stage a protest different from most. “We chose to walk,” Jun said, “step by step.”