Schoolchildren and teachers from Upper Savoy will come to Irkutsk to exchange experience in social pedagogy and spend several eventful days in Listvyanka. They will clean Lake Baikal shore, join sports events, paint the Wall of Friendship with Mongolian schoolchildren, have evening campfires and visit the main museums of the city and region. The visit will continue the long friendship between Irkutsk and Upper Savoy, which has lasted for more than two decades.
These are students and teachers from the department of Haute-Savoie who will come to the regional center for the purpose of exchanging experience in the field of social pedagogy.The schoolchildren will live in the “Ecolog” health camp in the village of Listvyanka. This is where they will spend most of their time. The children will take part in an environmental cleanup operation—cleaning up the shore of Lake Baikal, play friendly volleyball matches, and paint the “Wall of Friendship” with Mongolian schoolchildren. Every evening the children will gather around the evening campfire.
The program of their stay includes sightseeing tours of the city, visits to the Irkutsk History Museum, the Baikal Limnological Museum, the Taltsy Ethnographic Museum, and the seal aquarium.
Let us recall that Irkutsk and Haute-Savoie are linked by long-standing friendly relations. They began back in the early 1990s. A cooperation agreement between Irkutsk and the department of Haute-Savoie was signed in 2001. Over this time, dozens of school, youth, sports, and cultural exchanges have taken place, and cooperation in the fields of medicine and economics is developing.
The last visit by Irkutsk residents to France took place in January 2014. Performers from the Irkutsk City Theater of Folk Drama and the creative children’s center “Solnyshko” took part in the “RussenKo” festival of contemporary art in the Paris suburb of Kremlin-Bicêtre.
Based on materials from the press service of the administration of the city of Irkutsk.