NEW YORK, June 25. /TASS/. Jane Smith, mother of the U.S. schoolgirl Samantha Smith, said it is a true honor that Russia’s Artek summer camp devoted its new session of the 2017 season to her daughter.
Samantha Smith visited the USSR in 1983 as the Goodwill Ambassador and became a symbol of international child diplomacy. In 1981, Smith wrote a letter to the head of the USSR with questions about concerns related to the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, and two years later she visited Artek. This year, she would be 45 years old. In 1985, at the age of 13 Samantha Smith was killed in a plane crash in the U. S.
"It is very touching and truly an honor that Artek still remembers Samantha, and in such a concrete way," Jane Smith stressed in a brief email that was received by a TASS correspondent in New York.
"It is so important that we are all continuing to work hard toward making this a safer world for future generations," she added.
On June 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the children’s camp Artek in Crimea ahead of the Samantha’s Smile holiday session.
The Artek international children’s holiday canter incorporates ten camps, as nine of them have been refurbished. The number of camps is expected to total ten at the end of 2018. The new holiday camp Solnechny (Sunny) is expected to accommodate simultaneously 1,000 children with a total area of 6.1 hectares.