Charlottesville’s looking to add a fourth sister city, Jennifer Black reports for CBS-19, and the proposed place is Winneba, Ghana. The fishing town has the same population as Charlottesville, and is the home of the University of Education, which has about the same number of students as UVa. Our three existing sister cities are all European: Besançon, France; Pleven, Bulgaria; and Poggio a Caiano, Italy.
Mayor Dave Norris is shooting to take action on the proposal by May, which is when the city holds their annual game hunting festival. The Aboakyir Festival, awesomely, pits two warrior groups against each other to see who can catch an antelope bare-handed. The antelope is a stand-in for a leopard, which used to be the target, but so many people died each year that they recently moved to less dangerous game.
In some parts of the USA our warrior groups (awesomely) chase greased pigs (pigs can be very dangerous).
Sometimes they chase bulls and ride them.
The parallels continue!
A 4th sister city? Has Charlottesville never heard of birth control?
However, I totally want in on this antelope thing.
Sounds like a second rate location and event for a lackluster episode of Survior.
One sister city is one junket too many.
How many sister cities do we need?? They’ll have all in the world if they keep on.
Maybe we should send Council out to catch leopards(or better yet,lions) barehanded. One way to get them out our lives(and our wallets).
who cares? why is this news? doesn’t the city council have something better to do?
How exactly do the taxpayers benefit from all these sister cities? DO they somehow lower our taxes or improve our infrastructure? How does a sister city improve the life of the average citizen of Charlottesville? I suppose city council will want to visit our sister city, maybe they can bring back some antelope meat and donate it to a homeless shelter. What other problems could council have been addressing while they were researching yet another sister city?
This just points out how utterly stupid city council is. I would much rather see them spend their time monitoring toilet flushes at city hall in an effort to help conserve our precious natural resource – water.
Why are you all making such a big deal about this? It doesn’t cost the City money, it broadens our outreachs efforts for our students and more importantly for Ghanna, and it gets us out of our fishbowl. We are not the only ones on the planets, as much as the consistent bloggers on this site seem to think.
No cost to City? This Kool-Aid tastes odd.
I have nothing against “sister cities” but I do cringe at statements as ” It doesn`t cost the city money” which, in my view, are patently incorrect. A lot like “everybody knows” assertions.
A “little money” or “some money” or “we can spare it money” – that`s OK but “no money” is difficult to swallow. If that`s true – in every sense – well, no apologies, but I will stand corrected.
I’m wondering if Winneba wants us as a sister city? They’ve probably got far bigger issues to confront than some virginia town trying to feel good about itself by adopting another sister/
Would Winneba be willing to exchange city council members?
bewildered again, obviously Stonewall Mike feels it is of benefit to our students although he did not explicitly state how. Didn’t the school system and city council spend money recently traveling to Italy? Perhaps the money that they wish to use to travel next year to West Africe could be better spent on the new $67k computer technician position that’s not in the current budget and perhaps should be going to make up the future decline in state funding. The question is, what are the greater priorities? Since families have to come up with the money to send their children abroad anyway, why don’t we let them and keep our employees here working?