City Slickers

Program connects rural Montana students with counterparts in East Coast cities

Tucked gently into western Montana's forests and mountains, Lincoln County seemingly orbits in a different universe from the fast-paced East Coast cities of Washington, D.C., and New York City.

But a group of Libby, Eureka and Troy eighth-graders discovered a way to bridge that gap last spring: Go visit, and make friends with the people who live there.

"In each of our different places, we think, 'They're so far away and so different,'" Jesse Thomson said after traveling from Eureka to New York City.

"But that mostly comes down to a point of view on everything. You have all these political conflicts, and it mostly has to do with your point of view. If you could just look at that and try to understand each other," many problems would melt away, he said.

Thomson is one of Libby's Provider Pals, middle school students who have teamed up with individual loggers, miners, ranchers, farmers and fishermen to learn more about the people who produce raw materials for what families use every day.

Similar partnerships are forged across the nation, connecting rural with urban lifestyles. At the end of a school year of study, the producers meet their pen-pal classes face to face.

The students travel for another type of exchange. Peers in major cities and rural settings get a bigger picture of life when they visit each others' classrooms, tour their territories and share their lifestyle similarities and differences.

Executive Director Bruce Vincent started the Libby-based Provider Pals in 1998 as a pilot program between Montana and Washington, D.C.

Ford Motor Co.'s $1.5 million grant in 2002 established Provider Pals in such cities as New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, San Diego and Plantation, Fla. The program won a Preserve America Presidential Award in 2004, it expanded into Canada in 2005, and today is carried out in 325 classrooms where 8,000 students participate annually.

Last spring, the Libby, Troy and Eureka students traveled to New York and Washington, D.C. This summer, the urban students returned the exchange during camp at the historic Raven Natural Resource Learning Center, a former U.S. Forest Service outpost 35 miles south of Libby.

As the Montana students prepare to begin ninth grade in a couple weeks, they examined what it meant to be part of such an exchange.

Here's a sampling of their thoughts:

. "Living in Libby, there's not a variety of races here, so I got to experience other races," Lacey Anderson said. "I'm more understanding of how to see them. Before, [I saw] differences. Now I see the person and it's not anything different than just any other person."

She and her new friends keep in touch regularly, she said. She also gained a historical perspective that took her deeper into the nation's heritage.

"Learning all the stuff I did at the monuments changed my whole perspective of things - like the Veterans Wall … and the Holocaust Museum," Anderson said. "My whole life changed practically, just seeing the history … I have more of a sense of where I come from."

. Before he left for New York City, Jake Higgins, of Troy, wanted to see what city kids do for fun.

"They go to the mall and hang out," he discovered. "They were really shocked to find out we don't have a mall in Libby." But he uncovered a lot more universality than differences.

"I realized what it's like everywhere. City people aren't stuck up, they're all very nice. None of them are shy," he said.

"They're more open to things over there. They're just around more things than we are, so they have more open minds."

. Libby ambassador James Schnackenberg landed on another insight in Washington, D.C. He wanted to understand the big city, to understand what its young people thought about the things he considers a normal part of life.

"If they thought hunting was bad, I wanted to know why they thought that," said the student who comes from a family hunting tradition.

"When we hear a gunshot here, we think somebody is hunting. When they hear it, they think you have to drop to the ground," he said. "I could understand them by what I learned about them. It made me like them better."

For him, Schnackenberg said, the exchange also went a long way toward fighting stereotypes.

. Thomson, too, touched on the polar differences between views about guns.

"One of the (Montana) kids that went with us, their family hunts a lot. They have 16 guns in their house," Thomson said. "All the New York kids were really shocked by that. And we can carry guns in our glove box," another surprise to the city dwellers.

"For them, (guns) are just a way to kill people," Thomson said. He felt the culture shock delivered simply by the city's size. "I told them our town is so small that we know almost everybody, we know that they're a neighbor just down the street. And you pretty much always know what's going on."

. "My goals were to meet and see kids, see what their life was like … see what the big city was like," said Evianna Cernick, who traveled from Libby to Washington, D.C.

"I thought the city was really beautiful," she said. "It was really different from Libby because there were tons of cars and the subway," and more.

She feels changed by seeing the other end of the U.S. cultural spectrum.

"You have a different view on everything, to see how different people live," Cernick said. "For them, it's important to get into a good high school. For us, it's not. They have to work really hard to get into a good one. We have one high school in Libby."

. Jona Peltier, in her trip from Libby to Washington, D.C., wanted "to learn what their life is about and teach them what our life is about, so we can understand each other better."

Mission accomplished, she said. Merely the comparison that many Montanans get their meat directly from hunting, while those in the nation's capital get meat from the grocery store was an eye-opener.

"When I first went there I expected them to be snobby, but a lot of them were really nice," Peltier said. "Just because you're from a big city doesn't mean you're going to be different … I can understand their point of view in life, without thinking that they're so different."

. "I think it opened my eyes and let me see that there's more to life than what's in a small town," Eureka student Bailey Johnson said after her New York City visit.

"There's bigger things, there's better things. But there's also harmful things - just seeing people living on the streets of New York. We think we had it bad back here, but I see something like that and I think, 'It's not so bad,'" Johnson said.

"For us younger kids, it helps us and them experience and understand … their day-to-day life … I'd love to see them again," she said.

"I met many great people through Provider Pals and I really appreciate what they've done for us. It was really awesome."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com.