In early 2006, as Fran Price and her daughter Juliana, a junior at Brookline High, were preparing to join a Sister City delegation to Quezalguaque. Fran contacted her friend Sherry Flashman, a Baker School parent, to talk about donations of school supplies. Coincidentally, Sherry was preparing to meet with Principal Tom Cavanaugh on behalf of the PTO Social Action Committee. Their mutual goal was to explore ways both to expand some of the school's local community service activities, and to broaden these to include international assistance. As they say, timing is everything.
As a result of that meeting, Sherry worked with foreign language teacher Christina Collins, to collect school supplies to send with the delegation. Outreach began with the seventh and eighth grade language classes and expanded, through flyers and the bi-weekly Principal's Notes, to the larger school community. By the time the delegation left, the Price family was carrying over 75 pounds of goods donated by the Baker School community, including such items as crayons, markers, pencils, rulers, calculators, scissors, tape, and glue sticks. These were delivered to the Cristo Rey School, which serves 202 students from preschool to 6th grade in an impoverished rural neighborhood in the Municipality of Quezalguaque.
Upon their return from Quezalguaque, Fran and Sister City incoming president Carol Caro introduced Christina's seventh grade classes to Quezalguaque through a PowerPoint presentation. Inspired, Christina and her Spanish language students decided to deepen their engagement through an interchange with English learners in Quezalguaque. They outdid themselves, preparing 38 pen pal letters in Spanish, as well as bilingual dictionaries, books and classroom posters. Photos of the students, staff and school completed the package, which was transported by Juliana when she returned to Quezalguaque with a smaller delegation in late June.
The materials, along with gifts of dictionaries and flash cards, as well as paper and colored pencils to encourage responses (the latter purchased with contributions from Juliana's teachers at Brookline High), were divided between two English teachers, one located at each of the two high schools. By the time that Megan Fountain, the last member of the delegation, had left Quezalguaque in July, she was carrying letters from 19 students of Maryuri Ulloa, who teaches at the Las Mercedes regional high school, immediately outside of the urban center of Quezalguaque. The letters were addressed to particular Baker School students, carefully written in English, decorated and, in many cases, including drawings or individual or family photos. Reading these, the Baker School students are learning that, for all their differences in culture and material wealth, their counterparts share many of their interests baseball, hip-hop, reggae and rock music, animals, and friendship.
Come February, the Sister City delegation will again be carrying supplies from Baker School, and also letters to new friends named Marisol, Anselmo and Yorlene, who live in places with such names as Divino Niño, Las Mercedes and Quezalguaque.
