Representatives of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute were invited to the festivities of the Harvest in Croatian Končenice, which took place in Croatia for the fifty-ninth time this year. Countrymen appreciated the financial support which the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute on long-term bases provides to the schools in which they teach their children. In the town hall, the mayor of Daruvar Damir Lneniček met with the chairman of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute Jaromír Šlápota, who was appointed an honorary citizen of Daruvar two years ago. The meeting was attended by a number of Croatian celebrities. In his speech, the mayor stressed the gratitude for the long-term Czechoslovak Foreign Institute ́s organization of the substantial financial support to the expatriate community in Croatia.
A respected member of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute Michael Josef Pojezdný, the abbot of the Strahov monastery, reached 75 years of age in July and following the rules, he ended his mandate of the head of one of the most beautiful cultural gems in Prague after 31 and three quarters of years. The members of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute celebrated with him his important life jubilee and wished him yet many years of health and maintaining a positive wisdom that he shares with them.
On 2 August at a reception at the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Prague, the chairman of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute Jaromír Šlápota presented the Chinese ambassador J. E. Ma Keqing a member certificate of honorary membership of the Institute as an expression of respect for her work for the improvement of Czech-Chinese relations and the evaluation of her interest in the activities of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute. Cooperation and mutual relations of the Chinese embassy and the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute have been very cordial in the past four years. When on 25 February 2014 China’s new ambassador in Prague J. E. Ma Keqing gave her accreditation charter to the president of the republic, she immediately began to establish contacts with important Czech institutions. Among the first was the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute, which had maintained friendly relations with the Chinese embassy for more than twenty years.
She visited headquarters of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute for the first time in May 2014 and in October of that year, a few days before the visit of president Miloš Zeman in China, she came for a conversation with members of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute. She introduced them with the changing situation in China, with plans of its foreign policy and possibilities of improvement of Czech-Chinese relations and cooperation.
Representatives of the Union of Czechs in the Republic of Croatia, a member of the Czech and Slovak minority in the Croatian assembly Vladimír Bílek and other expatriate personalities from Croatia made a four-day trip to the Czech Republic early in September, during which they visited the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute on 6 September; they were welcomed there by the chairman Jaromír Šlápota, the vice-chairman PhDr. Libuše Benešová and a member of the managing board Hana Hlaváčková. The chairperson of the Union of the Czechs Anna-Marie Štrumlová-Tučková and MP Vladimír Bílek sincerely thanked for assistance in the furnishing of expatriate schools in Croatia with the modern technique in order to create the conditions for quality teaching in Czech and, in particular, the teaching of the Czech language, which they get from the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute. Just in the last two years, the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute equipped the Czech primary school in Daruvar and Končenice with interactive whiteboard with accessories, three laptops and a panel with a touch screen, the Institute sent to Czech nursery schools in Daruvar region art supplies and children of compatriots from Croatia were given a financial contribution to the trip to the Czech Republic.
The modern technical equipment is provided by the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute also to the compatriot schools in Vienna. In the past two years, it sent two interactive whiteboards with accessories, eleven projectors, teaching aids, toys and furniture for nursery, art supplies for 8 classes clubs and crèches, sports facilities and money to purchase computers for the high school to the Comenius Education association in the Austrian capital. On 21 September the next delivery went to Vienna – a therapeutic swimming pool in the shape of a boat filled with plastic balls, a gift from the company Aurednik cs. from Trubín.
The Czechoslovak Foreign Institute donated a set of art supplies for first-graders in the Czech schools from Zagreb, Daruvar, Končenice and Vienna.
