Next month, 52 citizens of Kazakhstan will be coming to Arizona for eight days, but they aren’t coming with Borat.

The Kazakhs are making the trek to the old pueblo as part of a Sister Cities partnership with Tucson and Almaty, a Kazakh city.

Tucson is hosting the Almaty Iskar Boys Choir for a series of mini concerts and a tour of must-see spots in Arizona.

Jerry Gary, the chairman emeritus of the Tucson-Almaty Sister Cities Committee, said the Tucson Arizona Boys Choir will show the Kazakh boys and their families around Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, Phoenix, Sierra Vista and Tombstone.

“They’re gonna go to the Grand Canyon,” Gary said. “We had to promise them that, (because) nobody wants to come here from Kazakhstan if they don’t get to go to the Grand Canyon.”

The relationship between Tucson and Almaty began in 1987 as part of an American effort to reach out to citizens living in Cold War Soviet Union.

Gary said the organizers felt it would be a “good gesture to start a Sister City (partnership) somewhere in the Soviet Union,” and chose Almaty because of similarities in geography and topography.

But Almaty isn’t the only sister Tucson has.

Ciudad Obregon, Sonora and Guadalajara, Jalisco are both Mexican sister cities, as well as Nouakchott, Mauritania, County Roscommon, Ireland, Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, Segovia, Spain, Trikala, Greece, Pecs, Hungary, Taichung City, Taiwan and Liupanshui, China.

Gary said that while Tucson has relationships with 11 cities only about six of them are operational partnerships.

The three main goals of the partnership between Tucson and Almaty, Gary said, is to advance the education, culture and economics of the cities involved.

And although each interaction might not accomplish each mission, the Kazakh trip to Arizona will fulfill all three.

“(It’s) cultural because we’re bringing a cultural group here, and it’s educational because they’re going to educational institutions (within Arizona),” Gary said.

“Economically, you can see that 52 people coming to Tucson for a week is an economic development within itself,” Gary said. “For every person that comes here, there’s an average of $178 a day that will be generated in the Tucson economy.”

Other programs that come out of the partnership with Almaty and Tucson include student exchanges between the two countries (there are 31 students from Kazakhstan studying at the University of Arizona), hospital projects, and speakers bureaus, he said.

This and other partnerships are part of a larger national parent organization called Sister Cities International.

Gary said President Harry Truman started the Sister Cities International organization during World War II, in an effort to breakdown barriers between the United States and other countries. The goal was to develop international friendships at the community level as a grassroots effort instead of at the government level.

“The focus is people-to-people diplomacy,” Gary said. “(Pres. Truman) figured you can break down a lot of barriers by starting at the grassroots level and going upward as a system rather than having to go government to government or president to dictator.”

The Sister Cities Web site boasts 1,992 partnerships with 694 communities in the United States and 1,749 international relationships in 134 countries.