In 2007, I was making earrings when I accidentally made one that looked like a little person. I liked her, so I made another. And then another.

Before long I was gathering old jewelry at yard sales and thrift stores—broken necklaces, earrings missing their mates, bracelets tucked away in drawers—and taking them apart. The beads became heads and bodies and arms and legs for my growing collection of little friends. I loved the idea that something that had already had a life could be taken apart and become something new.

Around that same time, I took a story from an earlier novel I had written and adapted it for them. I illustrated it myself on the computer with very simple shapes, and The Wind of a Thousand Years became part of the Bead People story.  

I started calling them the Bead People and rather jokingly to my husband called it "The Bead People International Peace Project" never dreaming how far this project would travel. 

I didn't really have a plan. I made them and gave them away. Other people began making them and giving them away too. I began bringing trays of beads into classrooms, Boys and Girls Clubs, and craft markets. Since that first accidental little person, more than 16,000 Bead People have gone out to over 40 different countries. 

I have thought a lot over the years about why this little project has stayed with me. We live in a time when it is easy to be afraid of people we don't know. We hear about each other from a distance. We sort ourselves into groups. We make assumptions about people whose lives may look very different from our own. But distance does funny things to us.

It is much harder to be afraid of someone when you are sitting across a table from them. When you know the names of their children. When you have heard them laugh or listened to one of their stories. When you discover that they worry about many of the same things you do and hope for many of the same things. The differences don't disappear. I don't think they should. Our languages, histories, traditions, beliefs and ways of seeing the world are part of what makes being human so interesting.

But when we get to know each other, something else begins to appear alongside those differences. Fear and prejudice are learned behaviors--so is peacemaking. 

Maybe that is what the Bead People have been about all along--learning to be peacemakers.

So I am beginning the next chapter of The Bead People by gathering what has grown around them over all these years—the story, the ways of making them, the kits and resources and ideas—and putting it here so other people can take them from here. I don't know where they will go next. That has always been part of the fun.

I'm Jamie Lee, a writer, teacher, artist and lifelong explorer of how we become more fully human. The Bead People are one of many things that have grown out of that curiosity over the years.

If you'd like to know more about me and my other work, you can find me at pjamielee.com.