On the phone from Changsha, China, David Youtz, president of the Yale-China Association, describes the city: skyscrapers 60 to 70 stories high, traffic congestion, Western goods including—somewhat to his surprise—a Lamborghini dealership he passed that morning. He describes, too, the remainders of the old city, where shops are situated 15 feet below street level, selling noodles, bubble tea, flowers, books. “The old town is still here,” Youtz says, even though Changsha has tripled in size in the last 25 years. “When I was first coming here in the early ’90s, it felt like a small city, and now it feels like a big city,” he says. A big city of more than 6 million people, to be somewhat exact.
Changsha is the newest of New Haven’s eight “sister cities,” a designation intended to secure a “broad-based, long-term partnership” between cities in two different countries, which might include “municipal, business, trade, educational, and cultural exchanges and projects,” according to Sister Cities International. But New Haven’s history with Changsha actually goes back much further than this 2018 agreement. Following the Boxer Rebellion in late 19th-century China—a violent response by Chinese peasants to what Encyclopedia Britannica describes as “growing economic impoverishment, a series of unfortunate natural calamities, and unbridled foreign aggression in the area”—a group of Yale graduates “wanted to do something to help China,” Youtz explains. “Some people from Yale were killed in the rebellion, and it got international attention.”
Yale’s representatives were welcomed in Changsha, where they eventually helped to establish a high school named Yali—a name Youtz says was “sort of an early translation of ‘Yale’”—as well as a hospital with a medical school and nursing school named Xiangya, or “Hunan Yale.” Through the first half of the 20th century, Yale’s relationship with Changsha grew, until the Korean War, in which China and the US were at odds. “As soon as the US and China reestablished relations in 1979, our organization went back…
That relationship made Changsha “a natural sister city,” Youtz says, and today the ties between the two run deeper than Yale. Mayor Toni Harp visited Changsha last year with a New Haven delegation to make a pitch for Chinese business investment in the city. Students at Hopkins School and Educational Center for the Arts are undertaking exchange programs with Yali students, and a teacher from Yali comes each year to teach Mandarin Chinese and Chinese culture at John C. Daniels Interdistrict Magnet School of International Communication.
Although Changsha and Yale go way back, New Haven’s relationship with another sister city, Freetown, Sierra Leone, goes back even further by way of the 1839 Amistad mutiny. When the ship arrived on American shores, the enslaved Mende people of Sierra Leone who had overtaken the ship were imprisoned in New Haven, eventually being tried and released. Many returned to Africa.
In 1995, a delegation from Freetown came to New Haven to participate in the worldwide Special Olympics, jump-starting a relationship that continues today. Volunteer Althea Norcott was among those who visited Freetown in 1997 on a “fact-finding mission,” while bringing everything from toothbrushes to roofing supplies. Every other year, Norcott says, the Freetown New Haven Sister City Project, maintained by a group of local volunteers, sends whatever is most needed. Following the nation’s recent Ebola outbreak, the group raised $120,000 to send four vans, which were converted into ambulances, along with water and medical supplies. They’re currently collecting sporting equipment to send to Freetown schools. Norcott calls the work “a community effort,” citing assistance from James Hillhouse High School, New Haven Reads, local fraternities and sororities and doctors at Yale, who stepped up to raise funds for the ambulances.
On her visits to Sierra Leone, Norcott has seen the nation change. “The first time we went
The city of Leon, Nicaragua, has been a sister city to New Haven even longer, since the mid-1980s. Concerned about the nation following its bloody revolution and the Reagan Administration’s support of the counter-revolutionary Contras, a group of New Haveners traveled to Nicaragua in 1984. Upon their return, they established the sister city relationship, and in the 35 years since, more than 1,200 people from greater New Haven have traveled to Nicaragua to volunteer with projects focusing on education, public health and domestic violence prevention, says Chris Schweitzer, program director for the New Haven/Leon Sister City Project, which operates as an independent nonprofit.
Though the group’s work began in Leon, it has since shifted its focus to two rural communities, Troilo and Goyena, which were largely displaced by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Today, the sister city project in New Haven provides fundraising and support for Nicaraguan colleagues. The organization has also taken up the cause of climate change, which Schweitzer sees as the primary issue that must be addressed if any other problems are to be solved. “The real concern,” he says, “is if we don’t cut greenhouse gases significantly in the short term, no matter what you do to help these countries adapt, we’re not going to keep up.”
These are just three of New Haven’s eight sister city projects worldwide, which also include relationships with Afula-Gilboa, Israel; Amalfi, Italy; Avignon, France; Hue, Vietnam and Tetlonohcan, Mexico. New Haven’s cultural affairs director, Andy Wolf, has big hopes and plans for future engagement with these global siblings, including cultural and sporting exchanges, an annual food event and more.
Real siblings don’t always get along, but these sisters—whether sharing resources in an exchange of cultures or drawing support from New Haven for deep-rooted, ongoing problems—have ties that bind. “I feel like the world needs more sister cities,” David Youtz says on the line from Changsha. “We need to bring people together.”
New Haven Sister Cities
Online | New Haven/Leon Sister City Project
Written and photographed by Kathy Leonard Czepiel.
