Area youth traveling the world through People to People program
By ROB PRICE THE COURIER-ADVOCATE

Kolo

HAMMONDSPORT - Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Kolodziejczak played on the Hammondsport junior varsity women's basketball team that recently completed an undefeated season. Now the Hammondsport teenager is hoping to share her basketball talents with an international community.

Elizabeth has been invited to join a People to People Sports Ambassador Program for a trip to Holland in July. The trip will include basketball matches with teenage European teams, as well as tours of windmills, dikes and the canals of Amsterdam.

She is one of a growing number of area youth to participate in People to People, a U.S. government program founded by President Dwight Eisenhower with the idea of introducing American youth to their peers in other countries and cities. Eisenhower conceived the program as a way of fostering peaceful relations between people from different countries, even while their countries were locked in Cold War animosities. "The people want peace," Eisenhower said in explaining the program. "Indeed, I believe they want peace so badly that the governments will just have to step aside and let them have it."

Hammondsport teenager Ryan Eckel recently returned from a People to People World Leadership forum in Washington DC, his first extended trip away from home. According to his mother, Paticia Eckel, Ryan's group toured the the nation's capital, with side trips to Colonial Williamsburg and Gettysburg. Activities included writing letters to soldiers who had participated in World War II and the Vietnam War, then laying wreaths at those memorials in the Washington Mall.

Groups discussions followed in the evenings.

"He made a lot of new friends and a lot of new e-mail contacts," Mrs. Eckel said. "He just asked me if there was any chance he could do a People to People trip to Australia."

In 2006, 14-year-old Kelsey Lanphere of Hammondsport traveled to France, Italy and Greece as part of a People to People Student Ambassador Program. It was her first extended trip from home, according to her father Gordon Lanphere.

"She got to see the way people in other countries live," Lanphere said. "There were things she liked about other countries, and there were things she didn't."

Kelsey had the added benefit of becoming involved in a Greek-based environmental project aimed at preserving a local species of sea turtle, for which she was interviewed on Greek television with a granddaughter of Eisenhower.

"She took it all in," Lannphere said, adding his daughter is ready to return to Europe with Hammondsport school district classmates.

According to Christine Kolodziejczak, mother of Elizabeth, he daughter was nominated to participate in the People to People international basketball program. Elizabeth subsequently gathered letters of recommendation from her soccer and basketball coaches, then was interviewed in Rochester by representatives of People to People. The program notified her in early March she had been accepted.

People to People encourages its younger participants to organize fundraising activities in order to pay for their travel expenses, and Mrs. Kolodziejczak said her family currently is working on some fundraising ideas for Elizabeth. "They don't want you to just have a free ride," she says.

And once those funds are in place, Elizabeth will be ready for her introduction to international basketball, not to mention the trip of her life.