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Amur volunteers built a 3,000-square-meter New Year’s postcard out of ice

26 december 2022

Belogorsk volunteers greeted the residents of Amur Oblast with a giant New Year-themed postcard drawn on the ice of Lake Peschanka. They did it for the third straight time at the initiative of corporate volunteers from Russian Railways’ Operational Locomotive Depot Belogorsk. The activity brought together more than 50 people from Belogorsk, Blagoveshchensk, Moscow, Svobodny, and Tsiolkovsky.

This year, The Amurskaya Pravda’s campaign in memory of Valery Melnikov, the lone ice artist, led by the railways staff, was joined by corporate volunteers from SIBUR, Svobodny’s branch of Gazprom Transgaz Tomsk and Vostochny Space Center who are all members of the Amur Chapter of the National Corporate Volunteering Council (NCVC), their family members, volunteers from the LizaAlert volunteer search and rescue team, school teachers, and staff of the city administration.

The campaign was preceded by a contest of sketches. A total of 32 works were entered in the contest. It was decided to meld several sketches into one that would depict the region’s important landmarks. In addition to the New Year’s symbols that the activists drew on the lake’s ice, they pictured Amur Oblast’s Regional Museum of Local History, the Arch of Triumph, the symbol of the Vostochny Space Port and the "Polite Soldier" from Belogorsk. The postcard covered the area three thousand square meters, almost twice the size of last year's ice greetings to Belogorsk’s residents!

We were very happy to accept our colleagues' invitation to join their good initiative. We received the invitation as far back as September during a sapling planting campaign. A whole delegation of folks from Russian Railways joined us then in the Svobodnensky district and helped us a lot! And now we are all working together in Belogorsk to prepare our New Year’s greeting for the residents of the Amur region. This whole campaign is very moving and the friendly atmosphere around it warms our hearts! Elena Snezhko, Head of SIBUR's Formula for Good Deeds social investment program, noted.

We didn't expect to see so many people join our campaign! We would like to thank SIBUR and Amur Oblast’s NCVC team for supporting our initiative. I won't forget the feeling of joy that I experienced upon finding out that our postcard was mentioned at the Moscow Corporate Volunteering Forum! It was then that I realized that our dream of creating the world’s biggest ice postcard could become a reality. Today we had our rehearsal, and it showed to us that we are on the right path! Grigory Chirey, locomotive driver, Operational Locomotive Depot Belogorsk, commented.

I have nothing but positive impressions of the event! I believe that events such as these bring the members of our team closer together helping build friendlier relations between the coworkers. Next year, we will definitely take part in this initiative again. Maybe we'll even make our own New Year’s card, Roman Davydov, engineer of the gas compressor unit, Svobodnensky branch of Gazprom Transgaz Tomsk, noted.

At the end of the event, all its participants received their uniquely numbered ice artists’ certificates bearing an imprint of the club’s seal. An important note inside the red-cover certificate reads as follows: "This document will remain valid indefinitely on the only condition that its holder commits to observing the club's main rule: to draw postcards on ice always and everywhere".

Everyone can become entitled to owning such a certificate, regardless of their age or place of abode, by taking part in The Amurskaya Pravda’s Festival of Ice Postcards. All you will need to do is to draw a postcard on ice of any body of water, take a photo and upload it to the www.ampravda.ru website under the section of "Contests" - "Miracles on Ice 2022". The authors of the 10 postcards with the most votes on the contest’s website will receive the Viewers’ Choice Award. The results of the vote will be announced in January 2023.