HUNTINGTON BEACH : 7 New Ambassadors to Sister Cities

The Sister City Assn. has named seven students as 1990 youth ambassadors to Huntington Beach’s two sister cities--Anjo, Japan, and Waitakere, New Zealand.

Picked to be the city’s youth ambassadors to Anjo were Bryan Baker, 14, an eighth-grade student at Sowers Middle School; Sheri Kanesaka, 13, an eighth-grader at Ethel Dwyer School, and Benjamin Beard and Jaime Ruiz, both 13 and both eighth-graders at Ss. Simon & Jude School.

Selected as youth ambassadors to Waitakere were Heather Archibald, 20, a junior at Cal State Long Beach; John Miller, 17, a junior at Mater Dei High School, and Erin Mooney, 16, a junior at Huntington Beach High School.

The students will host young visitors from the sister cities when they visit Huntington Beach in July. In August, Huntington Beach’s youths will visit their exchange friends in Japan or New Zealand, said Pat Dapkus, city government liaison to the Sister City Assn.

The Sister City Assn. is a private, nonprofit group that works for closer relations between the paired cities. The group holds fund-raising events annually, Dapkus said, and the money is used to pay half the air fare costs of the Huntington Beach youth ambassadors when they visit Japan or New Zealand.