Once upon a time, there was a small town called Cannon Falls. Cannon Falls was nowhere near the size of New York City, had nowhere near the amount of history as Rome, and its winters were comparable to those in Antarctica. This small town in Minnesota had no chance at being a part of something that would affect people all over the globe, right? Wrong. Because in this small town in Minnesota, not many years ago, a project now nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize was born.

The Afghanistan Project was instigated by Minnesota local Dina Fesler. She first traveled to Afghanistan to create an authentic curriculum that would teach American students, in none other than a sixth grade classroom in Cannon Falls Area Middle School, to be citizens of the world. “So here I was with a video camera, checking things out, and what had happened was I accidentally stumbled upon these kids in a refugee camp,” says Fesler, “Very quickly I got involved with these kids and formed a bond.”

This bond turned her curriculum’s statistics into friends, according to Fesler. And once a group of kids anywhere in the world makes friends, they tend to want to keep them. The kids in Buffalo, Minnesota absolutely refused to stop at just the curriculum, so they organized the first of what are now known as String Peace clubs – a branch of which happens to be located in little Cannon Falls. “The students there [in Buffalo] said, ‘Dina, how can we help?’ I told them… ‘I’ll let [you] join if you create a club that is organized and make a name for yourselves,” stated Fesler on the forming of String Peace. “Well, it turned out that they all had creative minds, because they formed clubs and came up the name Saint Andrew Scotts Strung by Peace.”

“We get to really know the people there… You can’t just walk away from it,” says Olivia Anderson, a member of the String Peace club in Cannon Falls. The Cannon Falls branch has been working all year on their own curriculum, which will be used as an app to teach the kids in Afghanistan about life in America. Through the app they hope to “tell the kids in Afghanistan the truth [about America],” according to new club member Katie Allen.

String Peace members Katie Allen, Olivia Anderson, and Vanessa Peer have been working with three Afghan boys who had met Fesler during her first trip to Afghanistan. The project that was actually nominated for the prize is Bridges Academy, mainly made up of these three boys. “They wanted to be part of the project,” explains Fesler, “So I agreed to educate them, but on our own terms.”

They are communicating with the members of the String Peace clubs through videos that help them to understand each others’ vastly different lives. These three boys are also becoming teachers to other refugee boys, and will be using the app created in little tiny Cannon Falls, MN to aid them in their endeavors. According to Fesler, the program is continuously “growing and morphing,” and the desire is “for them [the Afghans] to be able to take the power back for themselves and rebuild their nation.”

There are several nominees for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, one of which began in an itty bitty town in southeast Minnesota. Cannon Falls has produced students who, through the opportunities presented to them by the Afghanistan Project – as it is widely known by Cannon Falls students and staff – have learned about a new culture and been apart of something at least as big as New York City.