Evans City Rotary Club plants new International Peace Pole
The Evans City Rotary Club took the opportunity to brighten up the area just outside the borough’s library on Thursday, Sept. 12.
The service organization, which is a part of the Rotary Keystone E-Club, installed an International Peace Pole ahead of the International Day of Peace that is recognized annually on Sept. 21.
“We as a Rotary Club with 32,000 clubs around the world just want to make a statement for peace with it being International Peace Month,” said Rotarian Lee Dyer. “We’re just making a peace statement.”
Peace poles are located in every country, with an estimated 250,000 across the world, according to worldpeace.org. The inspiration to begin building and placing the peace symbols started in Japan in 1955 in an emotional response to the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Each of the classic weatherproof white poles includes the message “May Peace Prevail on Earth” inscribed in either four or eight different languages of choice.
Evan City’s new pole that sits along Jackson Street features four sides with four languages: English, French, Spanish and Arabic. There is another peace pole not far away in Zelienople Community Park.
“A lot of people will plug the locations of the poles into their GPS and find them,” added Dyer. “People will take pictures with them. So there’s a lot of that kind of thing going on, too.”
