The Henniker- San Ramón Sister Community Project (HSR) was founded in 1992 with the goal of creating cultural bridges between communities in New Hampshire and Nicaragua. This past fall, the project found a brilliant strategy to spark connections between children from both communities – through homemade comic books!

Bringing together art, writing, social studies and language learning skills, the Comics Exchange between Henniker, New Hampshire and San Ramón, Nicaragua proved to be a rewarding and educational experience for all involved, enriching young cartoonists’ sense of their own communities and connection to others. 

The project began with a series of workshops for students at the Henniker Community School, led by local teacher and Xeric Award-winning cartoonist Marek Bennett (Mimi’s Doughnuts). Bennett showed students how to make their own original comics about life in Henniker. As with pen pals, students had to think carefully about what was unique to their daily lives, and how to explain it to others. “Working in schools, using cheap materials, using the basic universal language of the cartoon, and the sequential motivation of comics -- it's all an invitation for these young artists to step back and examine their world, and make some real decisions about how they want to present themselves, their communities, and their cultures to readers from far away,” explained Bennett.

This experience was enhanced when a delegation of older students visiting from Nicaragua dropped in to assist with one of the workshops. “We did basic introductions in Spanish and English, and it was clear that the two groups just didn't speak enough words to communicate beyond that”, said Bennett. “But then we started to draw comics --we did comics jams about our favorite pastimes, what we did with our friends in our towns.  The two groups were mixed at all the tables, so that a Nicaraguan student drew one panel of the comic, and then a NH student would have to draw the next, or vice versa.”

Above are some examples of student artwork.

Through this panel by panel exchange, students learned to communicate on a whole new level. “The New Hampshire kids were surprised to find familiar sports set in tropical landscapes, and the Nicaraguan kids found themselves adding panels to stories about skiing and sledding, saying, ‘How do I draw sledding?  I've never gone sledding before!’  Pretty soon everyone was smiling, drawing and reading together, and really enjoying themselves.”

When the comics were completed, they were turned over to Spanish language students from nearby John Stark Regional High School for translation, adding both an extra educational layer and further community involvement to the project. “Through the translation process, we've definitely learned the value of presenting comics featuring both Spanish and English,” explained Bennett. “Having dual-language comics means you don't have a "Spanish Version" and an "English Version" of each comic -- you just have that comic, and both groups can read it!” 

The bilingual versions of the comics were then taken to Nicaragua by a delegation from Henniker. Bennett and several others led a new series of workshops with young students in San Ramón, and new comics were created to complete the exchange. “The workshop format has a long, rich tradition in Latin America, so these kids took to it readily -- we supplied a couple of concepts (cartoons, sequential panels, word bubbles, etc.) and they took those concepts and applied them to their own lives.”

Photos provided courtesy of the Henniker- San Ramón Comics Exchange Project

The cartoons provided a terrific springboard for discussion. According to Bennett, “we found we could point to any element of the scene, an odd branch or a detail of an animal, even a strange shape in the corner, and ask about it, and the student would have a ready explanation for how that element fit into the whole scene, or how it related to other elements. The fallen tree in one panel would suddenly turn into the object of a firewood expedition in another panel, and that would supply the cooking that happened in a third panel. So many elements seemed to connect and depend on each other in the created environments of the comics.”

Bennett and HSR hope to repeat the project, which is noteworthy for allowing children to communicate directly with one another across cultures. HSR also specializes in community development work, such as clean water, housing and literacy initiatives in San Ramón, as well as the promotion and sale of Fair Trade Coffee, but the comics exchange project had a lot to bring to the idea of cultural exchange.

As Bennett explained it, “our partner organizations specialize in solidarity work, which means projects that connect populations and develop themes of understanding and relationships.  And in that work, there's this problem of economic asymmetry -- no matter how much fair-trade coffee you sell, you still struggle with the basic fact that one side of the relationship is doing the buying and the other side is doing the producing.  The question becomes, ‘What are the ways these two populations can interact as equals, to communicate a clear exchange of materials/ideas/voices?’”  

Enter comics. “No matter who you are, seasoned professional or second-grade newcomer, we all sit down to the same blank page and the same raw materials.  And for the fifth graders in NH who were creating their comics, and the students in all the schools in San Ramón creating their comics, the focus was always on communication… Henniker-San Ramón really liked how this project brought young artists from both communities into the project as equals, as fellow creators who each had something to say to each other.”

Bennett hopes to organize future comics exchange programs and take the project even further. “Personally, I'd love to work with high schoolers, maybe, to do a comic about, say, comparing and contrasting the American Revolution and the Nicaraguan Revolution -- how would local groups in each country define, research, and draw comics about each revolution?  How do they view the other group's revolution?  How do they connect, compare, and differ?  But ultimately, this project is in the hands of the kids who draw the comics.  We'll follow their interests, and we'll see where they take the conversation.”

To learn more about the Henniker- San Ramón Comics Exchange Project, please visit the Henniker-San Ramón Sister Community Project’s website at http://hennikersanramon.blogspot.com.

For a detailed report of the program accompanied by pictures and sample comics, please visit Marek Bennett’s official website: http://www.marekbennettcom.

Look for Marek Bennett's book-length comic book travel journal this summer!