Students from Duluth’s sister city Rayna in Kurdistan are visiting Duluth to share their culture and learn about Minnesota’s.

Duluth Sister City International set up the visit, organizing their itineraries and finding host families to house the students during their stay.

The six high schoolers and their chaperone have toured the Great Lakes Aquarium, taken curling lessons, and even had a snowball fight outside the state capitol. Later in their trip they’ll head up the north shore to visit Split Rock and Gooseberry Falls, then they’ll return to Duluth to attend a City Council meeting and check out Enger Tower.

“We come here to exchange our culture, and we all see the culture of the American people. And they were very helpful. I love their culture so much,” said Dene Akhdir, a student in the program.

Romesh Lakhan, the president of DSCI, highlighted how this program is helping to bring cultures together, helping people to realize they have more similarities than differences.

“One of the beautiful things about the Duluth Sister Cities program is we are all experiencing some of the same challenges of homelessness, poverty, access to health care. And people try to solve these problems in their own way. But by getting people together, we get a chance to learn from each other and maybe try to figure out some of the problems that we’re experiencing,” said Lakhan.

“It’s one-to-one diplomacy, so when you get past all the rhetoric, when we get people together across the table, we find out that we have more in common, more things that we see eye-to-eye on than what separates us,” said Lakhan.