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2011 ANNUAL
REPORT 2010 Board Members: Lynn Bundy, Charles Delaney, Tina Escaja, Dan Higgins,David Hutchinson, Richard Kemp, Jane Kramer, Sarah Luneau, Lynn McNicol, Ryane Severin The Burlington/ Puerto Cabezas Sister City Program continues to promote interaction between the residents of Vermont and the residents of Puerto Cabezas, a municipality on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. 2011 marks the twenty-seventh anniversary of the program. While strategies have changed over the years, our focus continues to be the creation of partnerships between like-minded groups and individuals in Vermont and Nicaragua. OUTREACH During 2010, we promoted the program using video, public displays, and our web site which continues to attract visitors with questions about Nicaragua. Lynn Bundy set up a sister city presence on Facebook this year, and video footage produced during the 2010 delegation became an episode of Richard Kemp’s TV series, “Near & Far”, seen locally on public access channel 17. In October, in affiliation with the Vermont International Film Festival, we hosted a showing of Dan Higgins’ film, “Burlington & Puerto Cabezas: Sister Cities for 25 Years”. In December Richard Kemp procured a table at the Vermont International Exposition at the fairgrounds in Essex Junction where we were able to highlight sister city history and promote the wheelchairs project. WHEELCHAIR UPDATE Rick Schwag, coordinating with the sister city program and Lions of Nicaragua, is arranging this year for another shipment of plastic wheelchairs to the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. 550 chairs are expected to arrive in Bluefields this fall, with half going to Puerto Cabezas. The chairs will be distributed in Bilwi by the ODISRAAN group overseen by Bilwi’s vice mayor Martha Downs. ARTS GRANT In 2010 the Sister City Program and the Vermont Council on World Affairs jointly applied for an ambitious NALAC TCR grant to bring artists and musicians from Puerto Cabezas to Vermont to collaborate with their counterparts. There were to have been ten days of interaction, leading to exhibition and performance in the Burlington Firehouse Center for the Visual Arts as a way of introducing Vermonters to the cultures of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast. Disappointingly, the grant was not awarded. DELEGATION 2011 In proceeding with the arts project on a smaller scale, in February Jane Kramer, Dan Higgins, and poet Tina Escaja visited Puerto Cabezas. Dixie Lee, our contact in Puerto Cabezas and long-time friend of the sister city program, organized meetings with a variety of artists, musicians, and poets who spoke of their work and the history of artistic traditions in the region. Dan videotaped interviews with the artists, and Tina researched the origins of Miskitu poetry with scholar/ poet Ana Rosa Fagoth. Tina also created a collaborative poem with Miskitu poet Brigitte Zacharias. The February trip coincided with the annual King Pulanka Festival in Bilwi, where we were guests of the Alcaldia. Dan’s Pulanka interviews, combined with additional Pulanka footage by former video workshop attendees Julio Bordas and Rossman Flores, has been edited into a thirty minute DVD available from the sister city program. Also available are two other videos Dan made documenting arts and traditions of Miskitu and Creole cultures. COCAL SCHOOL Returning from the 2010 delegation to Bilwi, Johnson students Sara Luneau and Ryane Severin took up the challenge of raising funds for a water pump for the Centro Escolar Irma Cajina School in the Barrio Cocal. This is a school that the Sister City Program has been connected with for several years. (See 2010 annual report). In November Sara and Ryane organized a successful wine tasting fundraiser at the Clavelle House that brought in over $1600. A few weeks before the February delegation left for Bilwi we were informed that the Cocal School no longer needed a water pump. One had been installed as part of a European Union Project. Sara and Ryane agreed the funds could be used for whatever the school needed, and the school principal, Ms. Darling, selected two projects: building a cabinet and counter room divider for the library, and repairing the playground swings that had been out of use for several years. Dixie again took charge, locating an excellent carpenter for the library project and a welder for repairing the playground. Gathering materials became a project in itself, with Dixie driving his truck to numerous hardware stores, junkyards, lumber yards, wood planers, etc. A sad event was the sudden death of Dixie’s assistant Junior, a young man who had been helping us with each of the sister city projects. LAPTOP PROJECT Last March in Bilwi we witnessed the distribution to 3000 students in the Bilwi public schools of green and white laptop computers. The computers are equipped with cameras and Internet connectivity. Several members of our group have experience using the arts and media as ways of promoting a sense of community and see the laptop program offering unique opportunities for connecting young people from Bilwi with young people in Burlington. We are discussing ideas with teachers in “Port” and in Burlington for ways the laptop program might be integrated into the sister city relationship. IN SUMMARY While the sister city board is represented by a small core of enthusiast members, we function best as an umbrella organization, networking with other groups and institutions. We have collaborated with URACCAN, CEDEHCA, Johnson College, VT Council on World Affairs, the Center for Media and Democracy, UVM Latin Studies, and most recently the CORE program at Champlain College. Our most far-reaching conduit for connecting with people has been our web site, www.uvm.edu/sistercity, which gets many inquiries for information about Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast as well as requests for the various DVDs available through our web site. Our irregularly scheduled food-provided meetings take place at board member Jane Kramer’s house, 15 Beech Street, in Burlington. We invite participation from any Vermonters who’d like to get involved with this unique relationship between our communities. We can be reached through our web site. Board members are chosen among those attending our Annual Meeting in October. We appreciate the continued official support of the city of Burlington and look forward to continuing to provide Burlington residents with the unique opportunity of exploring global issues through the perspectives of the sister city relationship. Submitted by Dan Higgins, Program Coordinator dhiggins@uvm.edu |