From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
A Town, a Man, a Mission
Visiting my hometown's Belgian sister city.
DILBEEK, Belgium--Most Americans upon moving to Brussels are soon eager to catch a train for the short trip to Paris, London or Amsterdam--or a plane to Rome, Lisbon or Istanbul. Those cities do not, it is true, host the European Union or NATO, as Brussels does. But they have another sort of charm. Indeed, now that I work in Brussels, they are all on my to-go list. But first I had to go to Dilbeek.
Why choose, above all other possibilities, a medium-sized Flemish town known for making rugs? Well, you would, too, if you hailed from Dalton, a medium-sized town in the state of Georgia known for making carpet--and tied to Dilbeek by that most peculiar of bonds, the sister-city relationship.
Each time I entered the Dalton city limits, from the time I was old enough to read, "Dilbeek" greeted my eyes from a roadside sign. I vaguely recall writing letters to a Belgian pen pal in the second or third grade. Less fuzzy are my memories of sister-city visitors to my school--speaking to us in remarkably good English but in a variety not glazed in the sweet Southern drawl to which our ears were accustomed.
Naturally, I long wondered what this alter ego of a city was like, how it compared with my hilly northwest Georgia home, whether the people of that far-off textile hub would give a random traveler from Dalton the red-carpet treatment.
And so I recently made the 24-minute journey from Brussels to Dilbeek by train. When I arrived, a young woman in the station told me that the city center was not very far away, lying just over the "mountain." Unable to see anything that qualified as a mountain--at least when compared with the foothills of the Appalachians--I decided to walk.
Immediately, Dilbeek offered some familiar sights: houses with yards, the occasional basketball hoop in a driveway, even a few lawn ornaments that made me wonder: "Did they get that at Wal-Mart?" On a stretch of road that zigged out of the town limits before zagging back in, I saw a rusting pickup that some people I know would put up on cinder blocks; barbed-wire fences penning in livestock; and an open field speckled with snow in such a way that it could have been a cotton patch along the highways of my childhood.
By the time I reached downtown Dilbeek--which required me to walk farther than I ever walked in Dalton not wearing a marching band uniform--the differences between the cities had overtaken the similarities. For starters, when I had re-entered the city limits there was no road sign referencing Dalton. And the gemeentehuis was more reminiscent of a castle than of our boxy new city hall, right down to the view from its front door: of a brick tower floating on an island in a frozen pond graced by ducks. If I had a nickel for every time I've seen a frozen pond in Dalton, I couldn't shop the half-off aisle at a dollar store.
In front of the entrance was a large stone sign marking some sort of relationship between Dilbeek and Leuven, another Belgian city. The point, for me, was that it wasn't Dalton. I felt as if I'd walked into a girlfriend's home and seen framed pictures of her other beau. Inside, a greeter's smile turned quizzical when I asked whether there were any references in the building to Dilbeek's (loving, faithful) sister city across the Atlantic. He said after some hesitation, clearly reaching, that anyone who knew about Dalton would probably be upstairs. As I ascended the staircase, dejection had begun to set in. Was it possible that Dalton's affection was . . . unreciprocated?
My doubts subsided when I met Jean-Pierre Coppije, head of the city's population services and a three-time visitor to Dalton. He gladly showed me around the hall's stately chambers and told me a bit about the town. He even explained away, without my asking, Dilbeek's abundance of sister cities. It seems that it's common in the European Union to "twin" with multiple towns throughout the 25-member bloc, and Dilbeek maintains a partnership with a town in South Africa, too.
It makes sense, really; after all, we're talking about sister cities, not spouse cities. And the entire premise of the "citizen diplomacy movement," which turns 50 next year, is that face-to-face contact among ordinary people from disparate places will win more hearts and minds than all the globe-trotting of Condoleezza Rice or Joschka Fischer.
It is not entirely clear to me that a few letters between schoolhouse pen pals and the occasional pilgrimage of distant citizens can make the world a better place. But I, for one, am willing to try.
Mr. Wingfield is an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
