“When you think about it, where else on Earth are you going to see that? Israeli kids and Palestinian kids high-fiving and saying ‘great job, great goal.’ It was amazing and I realized this isn’t something you just walk away from,” Schleien said.

Up to that point, Schleien had wanted to use her psychology degree to work with criminals, but that all changed after the soccer game.

“So this is what I can do, I realized, I can teach other people how to make their world more peaceful and bring some serenity into the lives around them.”

Schleien presented a workshop in Toronto June 25 on mediation and personal conflict resolution to a group of young adults during June Justice Month hosted by Faith Connections, a ministry of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto. She explained different conflict styles, how to work with them and how to diffuse emotional situations.

She said mediation is a tool in peacemaking, although to really understand peace, and to be good mediators, people need to start with themselves by bringing peace to the community through volunteering and thoughtful gestures.

But when it comes to mediation as a peace-making technique, it isn’t just for adults and teens, she said. Kids can learn how to mediate conflicts just as well, which she learned during her graduate studies at the University of Waterloo during a project that helped parents teach their children how to behave.

“We worked with four-, five- and six-year-olds and taught them how to mediate their own conflicts, so if they could do it, I’m pretty sure everyone in this room (of young adults) could do it,” she said.

For the past year, Schleien put her restorative practises to the test with a pilot project at a school in the Durham Catholic District School Board where she works as a registered psychologist. The project involved a Grade 5 class that wasn’t getting along. With a youth counsellor, she divided the class into small groups to have them engage in activities that built empathy and helped them understand how to be a good citizen, perform stewardship and respect each other.

“By the time we were finished running this (eight-week) program with all the small groups, the classroom was doing fundraising activities together, they were getting along a lot better. The climate just walking into the classroom was better so building it into the Catholic curriculum was very helpful,” Schleien said.

Restorative practices should be done in Catholic schools, she said, because they focus on trust and faith and building empathy within Catholic teachings. Eventually she foresees running a peer mediation program that would teach senior students how to help younger students work out their conflicts.

Sr. Mary Alban Bouchard, who gave an introduction about peace, said peacemaking is a learned skill. Bouchard, 76, is a long-time activist for peace and social justice who represented the Sisters of St. Joseph at the United Nations in disarmament and the environment for nearly 20 years. She now works in Haiti and has developed a series of booklets and workshops in Creole to help the Haitians develop a culture of peace.

Bouchard is originally from Saskatchewan. She said Canadians have “lost their innocence” since 9/11 based on their black-and-white attitude towards terrorism.

“To think that the only response to terrorists is to kill them — that doesn’t do anything. To regain peace, we need to regain our position as a mediator,” she said.

Unlike the Haitians, who needed materials translated into Creole, Canadians have access to a multitude of resources in English to help them be better mediators and peace builders, she said.