Students wishing to be part of the Sister City student delegation in 2024 have until Jan. 8 to submit their applications.
From 12 to 15 students are selected to take a weeklong trip to Hanamaki, Japan, in June and applications are accepted from any Garland County student in grades 8-11, Mary Zunick, the Sister City program's executive director, said.
Following the trip, the students "will be expected to participate in Sister City Program activities throughout the year," a news release said.
"They have an application online," Zunick said. "They have to submit a letter of reference, school records. ... make sure there haven't been any disciplinary issues or anything, and then a character reference from someone that's not related. And then they just tell a little bit about themselves and what they could share."
She characterized the group as "a delegation."
"We want to send students that are kind of ambassadors or representatives of Hot Springs that can share some of our culture with the students in Japan," she said. "This might be the only American teenager that those students in Japan, the host families, or students they go to school with, will ever get to know. So we want to send ideal representatives from Hot Springs."
Students will be staying with host families that include a student "about the same age and the same gender in the home" while in Hanamaki, Zunick said.
The group will travel over together and they also meet several times before the trip to learn basic Japanese phrases and about the culture, she said.
"They fly into Tokyo, and then take the train, the Shinkansen, which is the bullet train is what everybody calls it, on to Hanamaki. And they spend their first night there kind of acclimating in a hotel. The rest of the time they spend with the host family that opens their home," she said. "And then they visit schools and area cultural sites and museums while there."
Applications are reviewed by a committee from the Sister City Foundation, Zunick said, noting the first student delegation traveled to Japan in 2009.
"They review the applications and score them," she said. "The top scores are selected for interviews. Then the interviews are scored, and the top-scoring students are selected."
Elizabeth Powell, who was part of the student delegation in 2014, is now a branch manager at Bank OZK in Hot Springs Village and remains in contact with many of those who were involved in the trip.
"To this day, I'm still social media friends with both my host sisters, our mentors, and chaperones," she said in the release, noting she was 17 when she took the trip. "My time in Hanamaki taught me how to make new friends, whether or not we spoke the same language. That weeklong trip sparked a lifelong love of travel.
"I went on to study at Pace University in New York City. I majored in History and became connected with the East Asian Studies Department. That led me to an internship with the Confucius Institute, working with Chinese teachers traveling to the U.S. for the first time. I was able to spend an entire month in South Korea, thanks to scholarships for my senior thesis."
Ten years since that trip, Powell has visited 24 countries and said experiences like this "can change your future, even if you don't realize it until a decade later!"
Applications can be found on the Sister City Foundation website:
https://hotspringssistercity.org
They are located under the Educational Exchange tab.
Elizabeth Powell, right, visits a school in Hanamaki, Japan, where she was learning to write Japanese characters. (Submitted photo courtesy of the Hot Springs Sister City Program)