LUCENA CITY – Waving orange mini-flags while swaying to the reggae beat of “Kapayapaan” by the Tropical Depression band, some 10,000 high school students here formed a human peace symbol during a mammoth rally held Wednesday in support of the call for world peace and non-violence.

“We are the next generation. We want to inherit a peaceful world where non-violence is a thing of the past. This may sound illusory for skeptics but we have to dream and act towards its reality before it’s too late for us,” Robert Mendoza, a sophomore student at the Quezon National High School, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

QNHS students, all wearing white shirts, descended from the grandstand and formed the internationally recognized symbol for peace – a broken upside-down cross inside a circle – which was originally designed for the British nuclear disarmament movement and became popular in the ’60s.

The formation of the human peace symbol lasted for about 30 minutes, after which Quezon Representative Proceso Alcala and members of international organization "World Without Wars" (WWW) lit a symbolical peace urn and released several peace doves.

Carmen Cabling-Alcala, a known Mount Banahaw protection advocate who organized the march/rally along with Alcala, claimed the human peace symbol was the biggest in the whole world and had surpassed the record staged by 5,000 peace advocates in Ithaca, New York last year.

She admitted that they were surprised by the huge turnout of student participants.

“We didn’t expect this to be this big. This only shows our youth’s deep longing for peace. As adults, we all have to listen to them to save the world from extinction,” she said.

Isabelle Bourgeois, a Swiss member of the WWW, was likewise surprised by the huge crowd of young people declaring their peace commitment in human symbol.

“This is unbelievable!” she told the crowd over the public address system while holding back what she said were tears of joy.

The peace march led by WWW delegation, holding peace streamers and chanting “peace to the world,” started in the morning at the Perez Park here and snaked through the city’s downtown area towards the QNHS ground in the outskirts of the city.

When the marchers entered the QNHS main gate, they were welcomed by yellow flag-waving students to the amazement of the foreign peace advocates.

Frenchman Gerard Hourdin, also a WWW member, was spotted busy taking photos of the students and shaking their hands. “These peace-loving young people are wonderful,” he told the Inquirer.

The WWW, composed of delegates from Argentina, France, Germany, Switzerland and Sweden, volunteered to hold a symbolic march to call “for an end to all wars and the use of arms as a means to resolve conflicts; for the elimination of all nuclear weapons; for gradual disarmament; and an end to all forms of terrorism and violence."

In a statement, WWW said the global peace march, which started on October 2, will travel through more than 100 countries across five continents up to Jan. 2, 2010.

October 2, birthday of Indian peace hero Mahatma Gandhi, has been proclaimed by the United Nation as International Day of Non-Violence.