Culture

Connecting people and building friendship

Connecting people and building friendship. That is the exact reason why I have been working with CA’s program manager Laura Smit and our residents Hui Dong, Jun Han to explore a sister city relationship between Columbia and Liyang of China since Oct. 2015.

The Liyang Sister City Committee of Columbia Association took its official name on Tuesday 6/12/2018. We are promoting culture exchange, high school students exchange, tourism and many more between Columbia, Howard County and Liyang, China.

Congratulations to all China Sister City Planning Committee members. Thanks a lot for your great and continuous work. It is tremendous work.

Congratulations to all delegates who made the trip to Liyang last year, including CA board members Alan Klein and Dick Boulton, Delegate Eric Ebersole , former long time Delegate Liz Bobo and Howard Council member Lloyd Knowles, Marcy Gitt ( Liyang Sister City Committee Vice Chair), Barbara Kellner ( former Columbia Archive Director), Laura Smit and many more. Unfortunately our great reporter Len Lazarick did not get the visa.  It was a successful trip.

I am looking forward to many opportunities for these two great cities to work together.

Connecting people and building friendship. Liyang China

Issues with HCPSS world language program

About the language program, unfortunately HCPSS is not offering enough support. Because of the budget issue, Spanish classes were dramatically downsized too. Here, I am introducing some community support for the language learners. For Chinese language learner, there are several channels you can use:

1) There are three weekend Chinese schools in Howard County:

  1. The Howard County Chinese School at HCC and Centennial High (https://www.hccs-md.org/ ),
  2. The Peiying Chinese School at River Hill High (http://www.peiying-md.org/),
  3. The Chinese Language School of Columbia at Howard High (http://www.clscweb.org/).

All of them offer Chinese language classes from K-12, paced with our public school schedule. The tuition is really affordable. There are more than 20% of class participants do not have Chinese heritage at all.


2) The Columbia Association’s language coffee at East Columbia Library. It takes place at the fourth Tuesday of the month. It offers almost all major languages and is relative causal. It is fun.  https://www.columbiaassociation.org/facilities/international-exchange-multicultural-programs/multicultural-programsevents/


If you can weigh in and share other language learning opportunities in the same post, that will be great. I can then put all of them in one place in the future.

Columbia’s Sister Cities Show at the Mall

We have four Sister Cities, Cergy-Pontoise, France; Tres Cantos, Spain; Tema, Ghana; and Cap-Haitien, Haiti. Another new sister city from China, Liyang is under the board consideration now.

Ongoing High School Exchange Program

There are three amazing opportunities for Howard County high school students to travel abroad next summer and experience the life of a teen in one of Columbia’s three sister cities: Cergy-Pontoise, France; Tres Cantos, Spain or Cap-Haitien, Haiti.

We are connecting people and building friendship.

Lisa Cameron Schuster shared a valuable picture (from Columbia Flier) when she joined a CA sister city trip to France long time ago.

Three Simple Rules Poor Teens Should Follow to Join the Middle Class

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-teens-should-follow-to-join-the-middle-class/

Extracted from the Brookings article:

Policy aimed at promoting economic opportunity for poor children must be framed within three stark realities. First, many poor children come from families that do not give them the kind of support that middle-class children get from their families. Second, as a result, these children enter kindergarten far behind their more advantaged peers and, on average, never catch up and even fall further behind. Third, in addition to the education deficit, poor children are more likely to make bad decisions that lead them to drop out of school, become teen parents, join gangs and break the law.

In addition to the thousands of local and national programs that aim to help young people avoid these life-altering problems, we should figure out more ways to convince young people that their decisions will greatly influence whether they avoid poverty and enter the middle class. Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities:

  1. at least finish high school,

  2. get a full-time job and

  3. wait until age 21 to get married and have children.

I am sharing my observation from my classmates along the years. For my elementary, middle school classmates, none of them have achieved the same degree of  success as my high school classmates. Majority of high school classmates went to college and have much better success.

I have some elementary and middle school classmates who dropped out and now look like 50-year old because of tough family and economical situation along the years. They usually have children much older than mine. Some of their children did not go to college either. When I was young, their family conditions were better than mine. They lost interest in school and their parents just let them drop out.  Since China’s economy is steering toward knowledge-based, it is very difficult for them to find a great job to support  the family.

My college classmates are all over the world. One of my college roommates bought a farm and is raising cows in South Africa now. Sure, my undergraduate college is one of the best in China and all of my college classmates are working really hard to find their own success.  They value every opportunity and work hard to achieve their dream.