Lawrence’s Sister Cities program connects community with Japan, Germany, Greece

In 1986, the City of Lawrence launched a Sister Cities program to bring people together. And it has.

The program has planted the seed for several marriages between Lawrencians and residents of Eutin, Germany; it’s brought our quilting community closer to the one in Hiratsuka, Japan; and it even helped KU Theatre collaborate on a Greek tragedy performed in the ancient open-air theatre of Iniades, Greece. 

For 36 years, the award-winning nonprofit has been promoting peace and understanding between Lawrence and its three sister cities. When the Lawrence City Commission first passed an ordinance creating the Sister Cities Advisory Board, it tapped Carol Shankel to help form a steering committee. Her job? To find locations that had a comparable population to Lawrence, with a university, and with an interest in cultural and educational activities.

That’s how she met Bill Keel, a German studies professor at KU who is currently the chair of Sister Cities Lawrence. He helped Eutin become Lawrence’s first sister city, building on an already long-standing relationship with the KU German department.

According to Keel, Lawrence has been sharing high school student exchanges with the lake-spotted German town since 1990 — the year after the Berlin Wall came down.

Since becoming sister cities, the Lawrence community’s relationship with Eutin has grown. It includes hundreds of student exchanges with KU and local high school students, along with choirs, artists, photographers, librarians, doctors, city officials, and dozens of middle school students.

“My favorite experience from Sisters Cities was the Eutin delegation visit in fall 2009,” Keel says. “We rented a bus and took them to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. When the Germans got out in the prairie, with the wide open spaces and buffalo roaming free, they just couldn’t believe their eyes. For them, it was the dream of America.”

Hiratsuka became Lawrence’s second sister city. Shankel sealed the deal with her connections to their city officials, and by leveraging a relationship KU staff had already developed with Kanagawa University staff there.

Located an hour away from Tokyo, Hiratsuka offers a coastline of the Pacific Ocean, a close-up view of Mt. Fuji, and an annual Tanabata Festival.

To celebrate the five-year anniversary of the community partnership, the mayor of Hiratsuka presented the City of Lawrence with five yoshino cherry trees, which were ceremoniously planted in Watson Park. They also funded the Japanese Garden project, located downtown next to the Watkins History Museum.

“During our 25-year anniversary exchange, we took the Hiratsuka delegation to Circle S Ranch. The [workers] met us on horseback at the driveway to go in, and the mayor of Hitasuka even went on a horseback ride. They all thought it was like a Western movie — just what they imagined this country would be like,” Shankel says. “They had a wonderful time.”

In 2009, Iniades became the newest addition to the Lawrence family tree. It’s now known for agriculture, but in ancient times, the city was better known for its wine. The Ancient City of Oiniades was even named after the ancient Greek word for wine, oinos.

The partnership with Iniades is relatively new but brimming with possibility. In July 2019, eight Lawrence-area teens kicked off the first youth exchange in Iniades. They spent six days with host families in Iniades and the surrounding small towns.

To reciprocate, a group of Greek students and chaperones were planning to visit Lawrence in 2020, but their flights were canceled because of the pandemic. Keel says they finally came over the Christmas holidays in 2021. The visit included tours of KU, Kansas City and beyond.

Although Shankel and Keel activated the Sister Cities Lawrence program nearly four decades ago, its benefits seem more relevant now than ever. America is facing record-high division, and pandemic rage is real. Sister Cities offers a defense against that, by helping people build (sometimes lifelong) friendships and cultivate values like curiosity, care, and respect.

“International travel helps us see how other people live, and how there are similarities along with the differences,” Shankel says. “[This program] is more than we ever expected when we started. It’s been a very rewarding experience.”

Find more information about Sister Cities Lawrence on its website. Lawrence residents can get involved with volunteering, going on an exchange, or joining a Sister Cities committee by becoming a member. 

Note: This article has been corrected from a previous version.

Jordan Winter (she/her), a contributor to The Lawrence Times, is a 2019 KU grad with degrees in journalism and political science.

Check out her work at jrdnwntr.com. See more of her work for the Times here.