Christiane Francois has traveled
to Boynton Beach’s sister city, Qufu, China.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Jane Smith
The owner of the defunct Dolphin restaurant in Boynton Beach likes to think globally.
“I like the idea of finding out about other cultures,” said Christiane Francois of Ocean Ridge. Plus, she loves to travel.
She became involved with the Sister Cities program in 2000 through a then-planner with Boynton Beach, Dan DeCarlo.
He had stopped in Qufu, China, while adopting his second Chinese daughter. He started to develop a friendship with Qufu residents and that eventually led to the start of Boynton Beach’s Sister Cities committee.
“I feel like I have a connection with China,” DeCarlo said. He points to the adopted Chinese daughters, claims that he likely was Chinese in a past life and now teaches at the Confucius Institute in Miami. His business card front is in Mandarin, the official language of China.
Boynton Beach is a member of Sister Cities International, which boasts 500 cities with 2,000 connections in 140 countries. Delray Beach has two, while Fort Lauderdale has 18.
Francois served as a board member since 2003, when the Greater Boynton Beach Sister Cities Committee gained nonprofit status. In 2012 and 2013, she was president. She is still involved with the organization and recently picked up some items at Costco to send to her Chinese friends.
The first time Qufu (pronounced shu-FU) sent a delegation to Boynton Beach, it was a day before 9/11. Delegates from Qufu, a city in the coastal Shandong province, made their sister city relationship official at a welcoming ceremony, according to news reports.
Led by Qufu Vice Mayor Liu Zhi Feng, they traded gifts with Boynton Beach city leaders. The delegates received Boynton Beach golf shirts, while city commissioners received gift bags of Confucius souvenirs. Qufu is known as the birthplace of Confucius.
“They had planned to visit other cities in USA before returning to Qufu, but had to return directly to China (after 9/11 happened),” DeCarlo said.
The Boynton Beach committee of eight, which included Francois, flew to China later that September. Zhu Ben Sheng, manager for the China International Travel Service and part of the Chinese delegation to Boynton Beach, arranged their trip and served as the tour guide and interpreter. They met the mayor of Qufu, toured the city of 60,000 and feasted on banquets with 25 or 30 entrees.
The Boynton Sister Cities group donated hundreds of wheelchairs to disabled residents of Qufu. When they delivered 200 wheelchairs in May 2007, Francois was there. “They really needed those chairs. They are very poor and couldn’t afford them,” she said at the time. “It was a very moving experience for all of us.”
Francois, who has one adult daughter who lives in Santa Monica, Calif., speaks proudly of the Young Artists Showcase they created with Qufu to honor artwork of middle and high school students. The artwork is displayed each Spring at the Boynton Beach Mall.
In October 2011, Boynton Beach adopted Les Cayes, Haiti, as its second sister city. “We always wanted a sister city in Haiti,” Francois said at the time.
Boynton Beach has a large population of ethnic Haitians and there’s potential for student exchanges and business partnerships with the 500-year-old city, said Francois, who was married for a few years to an engineer from Australia.
The first time the Boynton Beach delegation visited Les Cayes (leh-KAI) in spring 2012, the group received a military escort into the town, Francois said.
The Haitian delegation had to cancel its most recent trip when the central government in Port-au-Prince did not send the money needed to buy the plane tickets, she said. The group has not rescheduled the trip, but she is hoping the members will come soon.
She likes that Boynton Beach has more than one sister city and hopes it adds more. “That would give us more people on the board and from diverse backgrounds,” she said.
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