A letter to express gratitude
From March 15 to Sunday last week in Donggang, the Esperanto Festival celebrating Taiwanese literature was held for the second time.
Of course, compared to the King’s Boat Burning Ceremony (燒王船) and Lantern Festival, two recent events that took place in the same area of the city, our festival was very humble, but, nevertheless international in its own way, with guests from many different countries. Local people, the majority of whom were volunteers in the two previous major festivals, have once again shown their desire to help and their know-how.
The primary goal of the festival was to showcase the rich local literature. Unfortunately, many Taiwanese writers remain relatively unknown and, too often, their work has never been translated.
A second goal was to enable people to experience means of communication such as the worldwide spoken auxiliary language Esperanto, Taiwanese sign language and Braille.
I want to thank all the people who participated in and assisted with the festival. Among those I wish to especially thank are Donggang Hai Bin Elementary School principal 趙錫清校長, 許盛隆老師, 屏南社大瓊瑛 and Ping-Wen Tu (杜屏雯老師), who helped to make it happen in such a nice environment.
I also wish to express our gratitude to the lecturers, D-ro Amato (林馬可牧師), 郭繡儷女士, 許志雄, 葉亭君老師, 鍾鐵鈞先生; the interpreter, professor Abengo (卓罩明教授); the joyful students of Hai Bin Elementary school; Sam (李水源先生); Ya-Ting Chang (張雅婷小姐); everyone else that helped to plan the event; and, of course, to all of you who came, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
We were especially touched by the effort made by our visually impaired friends from Tainan, 美慧 and 南星, as well as Carole Chung (鍾彩伶老師), Wan-lan Chang (張琬蘭女士) and our Vietnamese friend Kvin, who participated in the event although it was quite far for them.
I also want to deeply thank people who could not join the event, but whose help was preponderant: 蘇進興先生, the Dutch poetess Anneke Buys, professor Ju-kwei Wang (王九逵教授) and Nami (林怡均小姐).
Finally, I am appreciative of the support of 美滿咖啡, the warm welcome of Apple 203 (蘋果203早午餐店) and 味益食品, and the article by Taiwan Info, which helped to publicize the festival.
Thanks to all of you, once again, for the kindness, generosity and time, and effort that each of you put into making this event such an enjoyable experience.
As we say in Esperanto: “Koran Dankon!”
Cyril Vergnaud (organizer)
Pingtung County
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