The future President of Turkey pulled off his T-shirt, hiked up his swimming trunks, and waded into the lake, progressing relentlessly if flinchingly to shorts-soaking depths. This was Gökberk Kutku's first overseas assignment, to a four-week retreat in a town called Pirkkala, in southeastern Finland, where he, along with some fifty representatives from eleven other nations, had come to exchange ideas about how to resolve persistent global ills: the conflict in the Middle East; the threat of terrorism; poverty in the developing world. Kutku, who prefers to go by the nickname Speedy, had a clear agenda for what he wished to achieve in his forthcoming premiership. "I want to save Turkey," he explained, walking a wooded path to the lakeside. "Turkey is now in a difficult time. We have got a lot of problems with our money. We borrow a lot of money from other countries and we can't pay it back." The meetings in which Speedy participated with his international peers often went late into the night, and facilitators drew upon out-of-the-box strategies: not just lake-swimming sessions but creative role-playing exercises and sing-alongs of "Kum-Ba-Yah." Over the four weeks, some useful conclusions were reached about the necessity for negotiation rather than confrontation in global hot spots, though there were some fiercely argued disagreements, particularly between representatives from the United States and their counterparts from Northern Europe, over the military intervention in Afghanistan. Inevitably, there were some tears. And many hundreds of Chupa Chup lollipops were consumed.

Speedy's Presidency is still a long way off and is, at best, speculative: he is currently a sixth-grade student in Bursa, a large city in Western Turkey. Along with forty-six other eleven-year-olds, he was in Pirkkala to attend a summer camp hosted by an organization called Children's International Summer Villages. For fifty years, C.I.S.V. has brought children from different countries together in different locations, on the theory that international harmony can be fostered by encouraging young Slovaks, say, to run frantically in circles around a playground before pouring water on the heads of young Mexicans. As the story goes, C.I.S.V. was founded in 1951 by Doris Allen, a psychologist at the University of Cincinnati, after her seven-year-old son said to her, "There won't be any more wars, will there, mother?" (Dr. Allen died earlier this year; she was a hundred years old.) C.I.S.V. is a volunteer organization, and receives funding from the governments of some of the participant countries. Under its auspices, about three thousand eleven-year-olds every year attend around fifty summer villages all over the world, and there are programs for children of other ages, too.

The delegations to the Pirkkala village—actually, an elementary school whose classrooms had been converted into dormitories—were from countries less antagonistic to one another than those of the Middle East. There were children from Austria and Germany; Finland, Norway, and Sweden; and Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil; with Slovakia, Greece, and Turkey thrown in for good measure, as well as the United States. (Each country sent four children and an adult delegation leader; there were also six sixteen-year-old "junior counsellors," from Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Canada, and Jordan, and four adult Finns, who were in charge.) At one point last spring, it was hoped that a delegation from Japan would be joining the village, thereby fracturing the dominance of the Nordic-Teutonic-Latin axis, but that fell through. The Pirkkala village seemed to be composed entirely of towheaded boys with crew cuts and girls with tumbling dark hair and slim hips. There was one black participant, a sixteen-year-old junior counsellor from Belgium named Maxim, who was an object of exotic fascination for the children on account of his predilection for wearing a skirt at every possible opportunity and, occasionally, a set of furry bunny ears, and addressing the male camp director as "Madam."

Many of the children were members of the international class of the wealthy. The South American kids all seemed

to have parents who owned factories or ran three companies: Adriana, one of the girls from Costa Rica, when asked whether she had ever been to the United States, replied, "I have an apartment there." (Parents of the fifth graders in the United States delegation paid fifteen hundred and fifty dollars for their children to attend. Parents must also pay for their children's airfares and that of their leaders. In the case of the Costa Rican delegation, they must pay for a four-day visit to London that was tacked on to the end of the trip.) The lingua franca of the camp was English, and though the delegations of some countries were more fluent than others—Norwegian eleven-year-olds, like Norwegian adults, speak English far better than do at least two out of three recent American Presidents—all the children seemed to have mastered the correct deployment of "like" in a sentence, such as "That game where we poured water over the Mexicans was, like, so cool."

Few of the children had political careers mapped out quite as extensively as Speedy did. However, Adriana, the property-owning Costa Rican, did say that when she grew up she wanted to be a lawyer. "I want to stand up in the court saying, ‘Objection!' because I like to argue," she explained. Maxim, the flamboyant junior counsellor, said that he hoped to learn about other nations and help other people by becoming a steward. "But I would want to work on a cruise line, not an airline, because if a ship wrecks you at least have a chance of being rescued," he said. Several of the boys declared a desire to become fighter pilots; they seemed not to have considered that this ambition might not square with their wish to attend a peace camp.

The Pirkkala day began at eight-thirty every morning. This was four and a half hours after the rising of the Finnish summer sun but was usually too early for the campers, who cringed beneath pillows as a boom box played loud Europop as a reveille. After raising the camp flag, the children trooped into the cafeteria for breakfast and sat down at placemats they had made for themselves, which were rearranged each mealtime. Shuffling the seating arrangements encouraged the children to discover points of commonality. One popular topic for discussion was food allergies. Over dinner one evening, Isabell, from Sweden, explained that she was allergic to milk. "I'm allergic to nuts," Irya, from Norway, chimed in, at which point Martin, another Norwegian, said, "I'm allergic to fish, oranges, kiwis, and bananas—though I'm not completely sure about bananas." Mealtimes provided an opportunity for the children to become aware of their cultural differences, too. Here they learned that Turkish kids don't eat pork; that Mexican kids prefer to keep a bottle of hot sauce close at hand, particularly when faced with the calorific blandness of Finnish cuisine, which ranged from Tater Tots to pasta with cottage cheese; that Costa Rican girls are already asking for low-fat milk; and that everyone, basically, would prefer pizza.

Certain cultural differences presented unforeseen logistical issues for Anssi Helin, the camp director, an affable thirty-one-year-old Finnish kindergarten teacher's aide who wore Winnie the Pooh socks and occasionally sneaked behind the school building for a smoke. The Finnish kids were accustomed to communal nudity, as were the delegations from other hearty Northern European nations; but the Costa Rican girls would visit the girls' showers only in their bathing suits. One of the Turkish girls returned in tears to the school after her "home stay"—children go in pairs to stay for the weekend with host families, where they learn about native culture by taking saunas and watching Harry Potter videos translated into Finnish—because her host family had taken her to their summer cottage, where there was no shower and the toilet facilities consisted of the forest out back.

Although language-determined cliques inevitably occurred—the Latin-American girls all hung out together whenever possible, the Swedes and Norwegians chattered away, and the Slovakian children talked to each other—part of the C.I.S.V. concept is that even if children don't share a common language they will find ways to communicate with each other. Several of the boys spoke the international language of Budweiser commercials, and would squat slightly, tilt their heads to one side, raise an arm in a hip-hop gesture, and growl, "Waaazzupp!" to each other. A number of the children had considerable physical abilities: Elizabeth, a member of the United States delegation, who attends the Chapin School, in Manhattan, was known in the village for her swing-dancing moves, which involved picking up boys who were smaller than she and flinging them commandingly around before restoring them, gasping, the right way up. No less eager was her fellow-New Yorker Zoe, a tiny, dark-haired girl from the East Eighties, who could be seen quite frequently tucking her baggy T-shirt into her oversized shorts, a sure sign that a slightly inelegant cartwheel was about to happen.

Much of the day at a C.I.S.V. village is taken up with singing, dancing, and playing games, all of which are supposed to be fun ways of learning how to trust one another and achieve by peaceable means that which might otherwise be attained only by violent conquest. Thus the Pirkkala children learned campfire songs and rudimentary dances involving a lot of stamping and clapping. They engaged in activities such as "caterpillar," in which a group of children lie squished together in a row on the ground with their arms uplifted and their palms raised, like an inverted millipede, while one child at a time lies atop the hands and is passed along the line. This was easy when the child was, say, waiflike Thale, from Norway, most of whose body weight consisted of long blond hair, but was rather more difficult when the child was one of those girls who had made an early transition into puberty without also losing their baby fat.

Many of the games were variations on the theme of tag. But at the end of each skirmish the children sat down to discuss their feelings about it, under the guidance of the group leaders. Each game, it turned out, was not really about running around and tagging other kids but was a metaphor for a larger geopolitical problem. In one complicated analogy to global poverty and epidemic disease, the children were divided by lottery into groups of decreasing sizes; each group was then preyed upon by the smaller groups. The largest number of children were designated Rabbits, followed by Foxes and then Hunters and then, drawing upon very contemporary concerns with biological threats, by Viruses and, finally, by a single player, who was Death. During the game, the Rabbits scampered madly, the Foxes had a brief moment of supremacy before the Hunters were introduced, and the Viruses strode around complacently, striking other players down while keeping one eye out for Death. The part of Death was played by Martin, the Norwegian, a diminutive kid with a shock of blond hair, whose English was so good that he could use the verb "to suck" in a sentence without stumbling, and who wore himself out so much running around after Viruses that by the end of the game Elizabeth had picked him up in a modified swing-dance move and was carrying him around the field on her back.

After the game, the children gathered under the trees and were quizzed about how it had felt to spread disaster or be the victim of it. "I hated being a Rabbit," grumbled Richard, from Sweden. Martin was asked about his feelings about being Death. "It was cool," he said. This was clearly the wrong answer. "Weren't you getting tired of killing people?" Anna-Liisa, the American-delegation leader, asked. After Marcos, the Brazilian-delegation leader, said that he enjoyed being a Rabbit because he had coöperated with his fellow-Rabbits, Martin grudgingly came around. "I felt a little bit bad being Death because I had to kill everyone," he admitted—although he said it with all the conviction of a politician who, having been caught making a racial slur when he thought the microphone was turned off, later expresses regret if he's offended anyone.

A peculiarity of a Children's International Summer Village is that while most of the activities are designed to encourage children to dismantle their preconceptions about the funny eating habits or personal-hygiene practices of others, one C.I.S.V. institution is designed specifically to reinforce the broadest of national stereotypes. This is known as the National Nights, when, two or three times a week, the evening's entertainment is provided by a different delegation, who take to the gymnasium stage for a presentation of their cultural heritage, and then provide food and gifts from their homeland. One night, the Swedes and the Finns teamed up for their National Night, much of the two nations' folk culture being similar, even if the Swedes are skeptical of Finland's claim to be the true home of Santa Claus. The Swedes performed their national dances, one involving dirndls and clogs and the other a reënactment of the traditional choreography to ABBA's "Mamma Mia," and showed a series of slides depicting Swedish life: blond people boating on lakes, mostly. Afterward, the Finnish leader, Mervi, stood up and announced balefully, "We have pretty much the same as Sweden; lakes and forests are what we have here. We also have Nokia, the cell-phone company"—at this, the children of every land raised their voices in celebration—"and there are five million people who live here, and that is all I can tell you about Finland."

More subtle national characteristics were displayed in other activities. One afternoon, the children were divided into groups of six or so, given cardboard and glue and paint, and told that they were to construct a model of their ideal city. After some head-scratching, each group got down to work in the playground, with each child constructing the element of the imagined city that he or she most prized. Andy, a heavyset Mexican boy, built a restaurant out of construction paper which he named El Rincón de Los Antojos. Adriana from Costa Rica considered making a disco but decided on a pizza parlor. One boy-heavy group of children designed their city around a skateboarding park. Speedy ransacked the garbage to find a toilet-paper tube and an empty yogurt container, which he painted and turned into an air-traffic-control tower. American Elizabeth and Norwegian Martin collaborated on a rock cave roofed with leaves, on which they placed a sign reading "Martin and Elizabeth's house."

The children were united in their industry, though there were inevitably some areas of conflict. Max, from New Jersey, contributed a tall skyscraper to the city he'd worked on—the World Trade Center, he said, although he wisely decided to stop at a single edifice. "Our city is called New New York," he said, assertively. "Why should it be New York?" Valentina, from Brazil, asked. "It's obviously New York," said Max, who was ultimately overruled by an international coalition of Finns and South Americans, who said they refused to submit to American bullying.

After the cities were completed, the groups inspected each other's work, expressing envy—why didn't we think of a Ferris wheel!—and admiration. Then all the children were taken away, out of sight of the cities; one group at a time, they were led back to the playground, where Giovanna, the Costa Rican leader, pointed at another group's city and told the group at hand to destroy it. Some of the children didn't need asking twice—the gleam in one Finnish boy's eye as he raced off to demolish the Skate Park suggested that when Santa Claus hostilities between his country and Sweden escalate he'll be volunteering for the front lines—though others, like Zoe, from Manhattan, were more hesitant, kicking at the cardboard towers halfheartedly while her co-builder Adriana leaped zestfully into the fray. Of eight groups, only one refused the order, on the ground that it wasn't nice to destroy someone else's work. Next, there was the inevitable discovery, on the part of the wreakers of havoc, that their own cities had been razed, ——and the shock of receiving Giovanna's next instruction, that they should rebuild their city with only the materials remaining. Then, as if that were not gloom enough, the children were gathered together for a long discussion about how the game made them feel.

"At first, I didn't feel anything; it was just like having fun," Adriana said. "But then when I went to my city and saw that it had not been destroyed I felt so bad about what I had done. I realized that there are other people who think before they act, and that if violence like that keeps happening the world will be a disaster." Lukas, one of the Austrians, his voice heavy with Teutonic regret, said that he had only been following orders. Ramzi, a Greek boy of Lebanese descent, said, "War could stop if, like, people would stop interfering in other countries' problems."

Omar, the delegation leader from Mexico, asked what recent current events the game had reminded them of. "In New York City, they came and destroyed our buildings, and we hadn't done anything to them," Max, from New Jersey, said. "And now the people in Afghanistan can come back to their cities because we bombed the Taliban." Gregor, an Austrian, said, "I think it wasn't right that they flew into the Twin Towers, but it also isn't right for the U.S. to bomb everything." Omar concluded, "The real thing is that in war there are no winners."

Later on, Nihan, the Turkish-delegation leader, said that she hadn't reported to the group at large what her charges' response had been, because it wasn't the kind of thing that anyone was supposed to say at a C.I.S.V. camp. The Turkish kids' solution for how to avoid cities being destroyed was "Kill Osama bin Laden."

Dissent was not, in the end, much prized at the Pirkkala village, where the camp leaders had to walk that delicate line between encouraging the children to think for themselves when it came to refusing orders to destroy buildings and not to think for themselves so much that they started to refuse orders to go to bed at ten-thirty. The notion, underlying the C.I.S.V. way of thinking, that children are fundamentally peace-loving and are eager to be steered in the direction of compassion came in for some battering, too. A cleaning-up competition between dormitories had to be cancelled when the children established a chalkboard Wall of Shame on which violators' names were written for all to see.

And there was certainly no room to debate the idea that in some cases punishment might be the most effective means of keeping the peace; or for the dangerous notion that there might be such a thing as just war. The day after the city-building game, Max declared himself as convinced as ever of the rightness of America's Afghan policy. "What I wanted to say is that we bombed them because they are hosting people we don't like, who are threatening not just our country but other countries," Max said, over crayons and drawing paper in the art room. "And have there been any terrorist attacks since we bombed them? No. We did it because we knew it would help, and it did. We scared the terrorists, and now they are in their hole. We didn't mean to kill innocent people. We like Afghanistan. We helped them rebuild and start a new government." Detractors, he said, "don't like what the U.S. did because they don't like the fact that we're right and they're sort of wrong."

Nonetheless, Max declared his own horizons widened by the C.I.S.V. experience. "I came here because I knew the Germans were here, and I'd only had one experience with a German before, a music teacher who was nice but very strict," he said. "I'm Jewish, and I've been to the Holocaust Museum, and I had an eerie feeling about Germans. The Germans here can be mean, but they are mostly very nice. They are very punctual, but they can fool around, too. And I'd never talked to an Austrian before, and I like them a lot."

The German kids, for their part, said that they were unaware that three out of four of the American delegation were Jewish, and that they were a little confused about what Jewish meant, anyway. "Juden—is that a kind of religion?" one of them said one day. "We don't know anything about that." Another German boy said that what he'd learned about other countries was that no one other than the Germans ate chocolate on their bread, and in America tennis shoes were called sneakers.

About a week before the camp ended, the children were bused to an amusement park a few miles away. It was a bright, sunny day, and the park was filled with vacationing Finnish families and a disproportionately large number of pierced and tattooed teen-agers with their hair dyed black or purple, who were in town for a music festival. The Pirkkala children marched through the amusement park singing, "We are from C.I.S.V.! Mighty, mighty, mighty, mighty, mighty, mighty C.I.S.V.!" Max, from New Jersey, saw a Finnish teen-age girl wearing a T-shirt with an N.Y.C. logo on it, and said, "Yeah, New York!" Nihan, the Turkish leader, thrilled at the sight of a kabob stand.

The big debate among the children was whether to go on the scariest ride in the park, a roller coaster called the Tornado, which was a kind of supercharged chairlift that swooped and looped among the treetops, hurling its riders along at speeds of eighty miles an hour upside down. The future President of Turkey decided that he would rather stick to the water ride. Elizabeth, the swing dancer, stood confidently in line for the Tornado but sensibly decided at the last minute that her fear of the ride trumped any shame in stepping aside. Zoe, the tiny gymnast, was deemed by the Finnish authorities to be too short to take the ride, and, weeping, could only be consoled by her delegation leader, Anna-Liisa, who promised they'd try again, this time with Zoe wearing a baseball cap perched on top of her head, and paper stuffed into the heels of her sneakers. Franco, one of the boys from Costa Rica, at first blanched at the thought of going on the Tornado. He didn't want to do it, he said, because he usually went on roller coasters with his father, and it might make him homesick. But as he watched the other children get in line he decided he would force himself.

After the ride, which was over in a rattling, screeching two minutes, Franco walked away with an aspect of quietened terror, as if he had stared down danger and survived. "Of course I was frightened," he said. "I'm always frightened on things like that," and it seemed as good a lesson as any for facing the international future.

copyright 2002, Rebecca Mead