This page is hosted by JournalNow.com, Web site of the Winston-Salem Journal. This story was originally published Saturday, April 26, 2003.

Homesickness crosses faith lines.

That point came home to me as I watched Trust Me, one of the documentaries being shown this weekend at the RiverRun International Film Festival here. Award-winning filmmaker Rob Fruchtman chronicles the first interfaith camp at Elk Shoals United Methodist Camp outside West Jefferson. Last summer, Muslim, Jewish and Christian boys came together for a week at the camp.

The boys share a lot during their brief time together - including homesickness. A Christian boy agonizes over his lonesomeness for his family. So does a Muslim boy, who pleads with his parents to come get him just two days into the camp.

The scenes brought back bad memories for me of time I spent at camp the summer after the fourth grade. My counselor wasn't much help.

When I cried to my parents on the phone, asking them to come get me, they asked to speak to my counselor. He told them that he was miserable, too. I looked back and laughed at the experience for years, but the film made me remember that it wasn't funny at the time. Seeing a Muslim boy go through the same thing underscored what should be obvious for me - beneath all our differences, we feel the same pain.

And there's another lesson in the film. We can feel the same joy as well.

The start of a miracle?

The Rev. Peter Parish, a United Methodist pastor and native of England, had been running the Elk Shoals camp for a year - in addition to serving four churches - when he decided to try the interfaith week. The film tells us that he made the decision after tensions erupted between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the months after the terrorist attacks on the United States.

Parish planned the camp with Rabbi Murray Ezring of Temple Israel and Shafiq Mohammad, the president of the Islamic Center of Greensboro.

Before the camp began, Fruchtman's boss, the president of Hidden Treasures Productions, read about it in the Wall Street Journal and asked the organizers if he could make a documentary about it. "I was cautious at first, but then I realized that what we're doing is of such importance that this was the best way to get the message across globally," Parish said.

Ezring and Mohammad brought boys from their cities. Christian boys came from Northwest North Carolina. The film shows the 32 boys, ages 9 to 13, arriving with doubts about each other.

A Christian boy, talking as if someone's going to try and convert him, proclaims his own faith. A Muslim boy asks why Americans hate believers in his religion. A Jewish boy says he knows a little about Christianity, but nothing at all about Islam.

Then come long days of hiking, balloon fights and archery. The boys learn about their different methods of prayer, let go of their differences and laugh together.

They learn to trust each other, and that shows when they play "the trust fall," a game in which they fall backward from a platform into the arms of their fellow campers.

And they spend the obligatory hours under stars by campfires. "We think you might be the start of a miracle of understanding, that we can show the people who live around us that we really are the same," Ezring tells the boys around the fire.

Before the prejudice

Both the homesick boys stick out the camp for the week, and they say in the film that they're glad they did. The Christian boy even helps save a Muslim boy who gets into trouble while swimming in the south fork of the New River.

I too stuck out my week at camp all those years ago. But I didn't learn half as much as these boys, several of whom have kept in touch with each other since last summer.

And there's more good news. Parish, Mohammad and Ezring hope to make the camp an annual event, and have formed a nonprofit agency to do so. In a war-torn world, our hope lies in children.

"It's hard to work with adults because they've got a lifetime of prejudice and preconceived notions," Parish told me this week. "Children ... you can get to them before the prejudice sets in."

Trust Me will be shown at 7 tonight at the main theater at the N.C. School of the Arts. Sponsors plan to show it on the Showtime cable channel next year.