“Santa Clara: Community rallies to fund school cultural exchange program - San Jose Mercury News” plus 1 more |
| Santa Clara: Community rallies to fund school cultural exchange program - San Jose Mercury News Posted: 01 Feb 2011 06:55 AM PST Click photo to enlarge Cabrillo Middle School student Marisa Pinero, 13, plays a hand game with a Chinese exchange student,Ming Jingziyi, 12, right, during dinner before a basketball game at Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, California on Friday, January 28, 2011. Pinero's family is hosting Jingziyi and Lu Li, 12, (background).    Participating in a foreign-exchange program would ordinarily be out of reach for students such as Tomas Mier. The 12-year-old Santa Clara middle school student comes from a working-class family whose parents can't afford such a luxury as sending him to another country. And his family's small apartment doesn't have room to host a visitor. But a program at Juan Cabrillo Middle School is giving Tomas and other schoolmates an opportunity to participate in a cross-Pacific cultural exchange. Families, with help from community members and businesses, are rallying to raise money to send about a dozen students to China, and they are coming up with alternative ways for students here to host their Chinese guests who arrived earlier this month. For two weeks ending Feb. 7, Tomas is "day buddy" to Difei "Frank" Zhao, who is visiting with about 20 peers from Changsha, China. While Frank sleeps at someone else's home, Tomas escorts Frank to class and is his new Chinese friend's guide to discussing weather, class size, history and anything else that interests the sixth- and seventh-graders. "I love everything about it," Tomas said. "You get to meet a person from another culture and learn how people eat and the kinds of buildings they have. Later on, when I get older, I'll need to know these things so I can grow and adapt." Cross-cultural student exchanges are nothing new. But the 3-year-old program with a school in the capital city of Hunan Province is especially meaningful for the nearly 900 students at Cabrillo, where 59 percent of the kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunch."Most of the time, when you don't have money, you stay in your small town, and you think that's your whole world," said Santa Clara Unified School District spokeswoman Tabitha Kappeler-Hurley. "This exchange and travel takes them outside their community and lets them realize how much more there is to life." While the Chinese students are in Santa Clara, school leaders have arranged all sorts of American activities for them, including a hamburger and hot dog dinner and a high school basketball game at Wilcox High. This week, they'll dine Italian and attend a Sharks hockey game. They'll also celebrate the Lunar New Year together on Thursday and say goodbye the following day at China Stix restaurant in Santa Clara, whose owner has helped tremendously with financial support and who led last year's trip to China, when Cabrillo students took their first trip to Changsha. Funding the trip last April was a financial challenge for many of the families. But many dug in, and pieced together money to pay for their children's $2,500 share of the trip. One father's employer ended up pitching in $1,000. "When we heard the cost was $2,500, that was like $25 million to us," said Karen Stalker-Alves, a preschool teacher whose husband had been laid off for nearly three years. But the couple was determined to give their daughter, Kaleigh, then 13, an experience of a lifetime. Her relatives contributed what they could: Instead of Christmas and birthday gifts, they sent in money so Kaleigh could go on the trip. They even sent some money so that Stalker-Alves could go, too. But Stalker-Alves didn't just want to accept charity. She volunteered to lead the trip's fundraising efforts. Knowing that she wasn't the only one with money problems, she enlisted the help of all the travel-bound students. The 12 children sold candy, beef jerky, China Stix coupons, refreshments at school movie nights and a Valentine's Day dance. At Santa Clara's Art & Wine festival, the students sold caramel apples and frozen yogurt. In the end, each child got a $300 refund, and there was even enough money raised to share on extras in China, such as tickets to Hong Kong Disneyland. To this day, those students are talking about their adventures along the Great Wall and telling their families the precise way to boil Chinese tea. A fresh group of Cabrillo students hopes to begin fundraising this summer and travel to China on spring break in 2012. Mary Anne Bowles, the P.E. and leadership teacher who chaperoned the trip, was amazed at how the Cabrillo community pulled together to expand the horizons of children, many who had never taken a trip out of California before. "This was something extra special," she said. "Kids may not even realize the financial hardship their parents are in. So, for the parents to give their kids this experience to see the world, I'm just so impressed they seized it." Contact Lisa Fernandez at 408-920-5002. If you'd like to contribute to next year's trip to China You can make checks out to "Cabrillo Middle School China Trip" and send them to Cabrillo Middle School, 2550 Cabrillo Ave., Santa Clara, CA 95051. For more information, call the school at 408-983-2660. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2011 06:33 AM PST On Monday, Chinese Americans joined the increasingly un-exclusive ranks of those groups with internet dating sites designed exclusively for them. Jews seeking Jews have JDate. Ivy league alum? IvyDate.com. (Those with even more specific dreams of Ivy league love can check out DateHarvardSq.com -- a site created to cater to women who didn't graduate from Harvard, but would like to date a man who did.) Black? Beautiful? Devoted Apple user? BlackSIngles.com, BeautifulPeople.com, and Cupidtino.com have you covered. And now, there is 2RedBeans.com, for Chinese Americans, which promises on its website "It works! 1 out of 5 couples meet online." The site, which is free, tries to match users "in accordance with Chinese cultural values," according to Techcrunch, which dubs it "a JDate for Chinese-Americans." Techcrunch runs the numbers: Get HuffPost Technology On Twitter and Facebook! Know something we don't? E-mail us at technology@huffingtonpost.com This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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