Today we had Del Mar's former mayor Mr. Richard Earnest present an exciting talk about the string of pearls built around the Pacific Rim as part of the Pacific Rim Park Project. He is a graduate of the Naval Academy and became a fighter pilot in Vietnam. He spent 30 years in the tech industry, running 6 different public and private firms as CEO. He also served as City Council member in Del Mar for 14 years and Mayor three times. He is still working and helping a company that builds inflatable air supported greenhouses.
String of Pearls is a very ambitions project with the goal to build small parks that face the Pacific Ocean in various countries around the Pacific. The major criteria is that students from various countries build these parks during summer breaks. The hosting country will provide all the accommodation and food. Their goal is to build 41 parks and 7 have been built so far. One of the key project founder is James Hubbell - the famous artist from Santa Ysabel, CA. James provides all the art design.
These parks are built within 30 days and involves tremendous coordination between the students and the hosting country. It provides these students with a great opportunity to connect with different cultures via art. The primary theme is to have an object that resembles a pearl in all the parks. They recently built a park in China last year and later found out that the government demolished it for some other construction and no one was informed! The Park Rim organization finally located another spot and will be building that this July.
They see that the students lean a lot of team-building skills and communicating with them via art since most of them don't know each other's languages! In one case a Mexican student met a Japanese student and they fell in love and got married and recently had a child. So, Richard says that this project creates more than art!
Richard is very passionate about these projects and works on raising the necessary funds to send these kids all around the world. It seems that Jim Hubbell , who is 88 yrs old is still very active and visits every site that is being built.
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