Today, at Thea Foss Park, Tacoma Sister Cities joined the Center for Spiritual Living-Tacoma and the Greater Tacoma Peace Prize as we share our hopes and prayers for healing our planet. We belong to one human family. Let us shape peace together by celebrating International Peace Day.
Hunter WHITE, Chair of the Taichung, Taiwan Sister City Committee made the following remarks on the event:
We are grateful to be a participant in and recipient of…peace in action in these unstable times.
Back in the fall of 2019, we received letters from our sister cities of Fuzhou, China and friendship city of Mianyang, China asking for any help we could offer. The two cities were in the midst of an intense pandemic, one that we were aware of from reading news headlines, but weren’t closely acquainted with yet.
We were able to raise some funds in the community and send a respectable amount of masks and surgical gowns to our friends overseas.
And when the tables were turned just a few short months later, our friends in China repaid the favor many times over, donating well in excess of our original gift. You can read about this in this article in our News blog
This time, more than any other periods in our recent history, is a time where people need to connect at the human level and lend a hand to our friends in need. In order to do that, we often need to surpass the boundaries created by global politics and international relations.
Sister city relationships are a key way to enact peace, as this exchange of medical supplies shows. “The Chinese” are not our enemies; in fact our Chinese sister city relationship was a key aspect in our city’s response to COVID and in building a steady supply of masks.
And the Fuzhou and Mianyang communities were not the only ones to help.
Our Sister City relationship with Taichung, Taiwan has allowed us to become close with the TECO (Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office) in Seattle. They reached out to donate several thousand additional masks, which were set aside for our city as a way to honor our sister city relationship.
This was not just one small act of peace either; the Taiwan government has donated over 50 million masks to 80 countries all across this globe, including several million to cities in nearly every state in America. President Tsai herself has dedicated many resources to this global project, mentioning that it is “truly an honor to witness people’s generosity in action. Taiwan is but one small island, merely offering a hand, but we hope to create a wave of support and help across the globe.”