The Our Bridge Education Centre Gets Under Way

In the last newsletter you already heard that the truck with all the material from Germany arrived in Khanke. We used the past weeks to distribute the contents among the new course rooms and to set up new classrooms.

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Building the playground and the workshop house

We have also built our new workshop house and set up the playground. During breaks, and before and after lessons, the children can simply be children and play on our lovely playground. Children who do not take part in our education programme are also warmly welcome after school.

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Widows and orphans move house

At the same time, the previously empty annex at the front of the orphanage was spruced up and extended so that the widows and orphans could move in and take the first step toward independence. Naturally, we continue to fund the families, but the physical separation encourages them to take on more responsibility and show more initiative.

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Opening of the education centre

Because the widows and orphans moved out, we could use the rooms we gained as course rooms for the education centre, and so we can now teach 200 people from our sponsorship programme every day. In addition to our existing team, we have hired teachers for English, mathematics and history. In two joint workshops, get-to-know-you games and meetings, we strengthened the team spirit and built a teaching staff. On 6 March we were finally able to open the education centre with a ceremony.

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New intern

For the next five months, Zerga Tulan will support us in the office and with the course programme. Zerga studies social work and speaks Kurdish. We are delighted to have her.
P.S. The next newsletter, which comes out in two weeks, will already be written by her, and she will then report in detail on her work at the Harman orphanage.