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“In celebration of the Statue of Liberty’s 125th birthday (October 28th, 2011), the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, in collaboration with the U.S. National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument, the City of New York Parks and Recreations, and the American Association of Teachers of French are hosting a Franco-American Transatlantic contest for students in grades pre-K to 12.”
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–KEY NOTE ADDRESS TO THE STUDENTS
Also she went under several repairs, 125 years after ‘immigrating’ to New York from France, considering her old age, the Statue of Liberty is doing quiet well – on the contrary our ‘world’ has been going under fast speed changes, some of them drastic. We can easily argue, good ones and not so good ones. For example in the course of this period our environment has been affected by very serious degradations.
We want to know what is your take on this!
After all, some of you who are skateboarding today around the parks and school yards could very well become the commissioners of this parks or the principals of this schools in a near future – to your surprise this may accrue way sooner that you may imagine. It will be your turn for actions and responsibilities taking – so why not starting to learn and apply some of these principles right now, it will make your task only easier in the near futur.
For many year to go [as it is his function] the Statue may remain the same. Still to be straight honest, at the pace we are moving or not moving, there may not be very much of ‘environment’ left – unless we act immediately in a sensible manner. In fact, as we are all of us part of this ‘nature’, denying the urgency of the problem and the great task laying in front of us to remedy put us all under great danger.
We may not be aware of it, but for every juice, soda and lunch box container we are ‘dumping’, we are actually contributing to the destruction of our environment and therefor ourselves. The trash we are able to produce is so overwhelming that we don’t know what to do with it anymore…
Thank you.
Raymond Verdaguer
president ‘ Rock the Statue Green’ contest.
R.S.V.P – [212] 439-1436 or email education@frenchculture.org – bring your ID
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read more about the additional info and rules of the contest […]
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some promising talent
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– Quoted texts are a copyright of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, 2011.
– Linoleum cuts, photographs and texts copyright Raymond Verdaguer, 2011.