Montgomery County officials will join dozens of volunteers in a journey to Morazan, El Salvador, next week to do everything from building a home to supporting expectant mothers as the county establishes its first “Sister City’’ relationship.
MoverMoms of Bethesda, Hungry Music and Habitat for Humanity, Montgomery County, are just some of the many groups working to create connections in Morazan, which is a department in the northeastern part of the Central American country that has a population of more than 200,000. A department in El Salvador is roughly the same as a state in the United States, said Bruce Adams, director of the Montgomery County Office of Community Partnerships.
The “Sister City” relationship will become official on Tuesday, when Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett signs the document along with Miguel Ventura, governor of Morazan, in the department’s capital of San Francisco Gotera.
“We want to establish a long-term relationship between the people of Morazan and the people of Montgomery County,” Adams said. “There are 50,000 Salvadorans in the county. It is the largest country of origin for the immigrant population of [Montgomery County].”
Leggett started the Montgomery County Sister Cities Program in 2008, said Patrick Lacefield, spokesman for Leggett.
“He feels like Montgomery County is a place [with] people from all over the globe, and he thought this seemed like a good way to connect on a people-to-people basis,” Lacefield said.
Although El Salvador is the first country to be involved in the program, the county hopes to establish relationships with other countries around the world as well, Adams said.
“The next sister city will be Beit Shemesh in Israel,” Adams said. “That is a community that the Jewish community in Montgomery County already had a relationship with, so [the Sister Cities Board] has approved moving forward with a formal sister city relationship.’’
Adams said he expects one or two more sister cities to be named over the next two years from such countries as Ethiopia, India and China.
About 70 people are going to Morazan next week to establish ties between the people in El Salvador and those in Montgomery County. The travelers are leaving on different days and each will stay about a week.
“We are each paying our own way, [even Leggett], because while this is really worthy work, with the economy there is no way we should spend tax dollars on this,” Adams said.
Among those who will take the journey are Rebecca Kahlenberg, executive director of MoverMoms, a Bethesda nonprofit dedicated to community service. The MoverMoms motto is “Fun with a purpose,” and Kahlenberg said the organization is mainly involved in such local work as preparing meals for shelters, collecting for food banks and volunteering at The Children’s Inn at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.
Kahlenberg said Adams asked her to go on an exploratory trip to Morazan last summer, and she came back enthusiastic about the work her group could do there to help others, especially school children and expectant mothers. Kahlenberg worked with a Peace Corps volunteer in Morazan to identify needs and decide how best to use her group’s resources.
“We instituted a cultural exchange program with the school and Bannockburn Elementary School [in Bethesda],’’ she said. “It’s kind of a priority with the sister city concept, the cultural exchange.”
The students shared their worlds with each other through letters and photos, and Kahlenberg also recruited volunteers and collected baby blankets, small toys and books to take to pregnant women in Morazan.
John Paukstis, executive director of Habitat for Humanity, Montgomery County, also went on last year’s exploratory trip and will lead a group of 10 volunteers to work on the first Habitat house to be built in Morazan.
“There are Habitat for Humanity offices in El Salvador; they have built over 7,000 homes [there], but not in this area,” he said. “Our group will work nine days.”
The group’s goal is to build a community of 56 homes, and each house takes about six weeks to build, Paukstis said.
“Habitats from all over the world will help with this project,” he said.
Other groups represented on the trip to El Salvador this summer are Identity, a program that works with Latino youth to help them achieve a sense of “confidence, connection and control” in their lives; Hungry for Music, which is dedicated to “providing the gift of music to underserved children who are hungry to play;” and representatives from the Montgomery County Department of Recreation.
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