farhang (culture)

My first step to form organized activities to help Afghan refugee children was to set up the Farhang school (In the beginning, it was named the Amir Al-Momenin Cultural-Educational Institute). When I was informed that there were many refugee children who were deprived of going to school, I came here & with the help of a friend we talked to the refugee elders. We shared our plan with them & fortunately they welcomed it well, some of them agreed to inform the refugee families about the establishment of a school for refugee children who are deprived of an education. With their help, we could make a list of families who had school age children. In less than a week, about 340 children were enrolled. At the same time we announced that refugees with at least a high school diploma could cooperate with us as a teacher. About 55 people applied for being a teacher, most of whom were young girls from the first generation of refugees who were able to go to school before the strictures. We rented a large house with five rooms as the school building, and since we did not have desks and benches yet, we carpeted all the rooms and put the blackboards on the walls, and after a simple recruitment exam, we selected a number of applicants as teachers.

In order to prepare school textbooks, we also asked our compatriots who worked in the waste recycling centers of Tehran to separate the old school books that Iranians had thrown in the trash. Fortunately, they managed to find enough old but usable books within a week, and provided them to us at a very love price. In this way, the school was set up and the refugee children, who were dropped out of school for two, three or four years, found the opportunity to attend the classes.