In light of the success of a one-week photo and film exhibition in Dezember 2017 in Hamburg and the resulting donations, Our Bridge builds another two-stories building next to the main building. The new building offers another six sleeping dorms with a total of 48 beds, two bathrooms and another kitchen.
Spring of 2018, we decide to let all children and widows move from the main building to the new building and begin re-imagining all eight sleeping dorms in the main building as class rooms.
That change opens up the path to offer free school education not just to the children living in the orphanage, but to all children in the Our Bridge guardian program living in Khanke.
Additionally we invest into a school bus, picking up the children from the UN camps and the illegal camps in the morning and bringing them home in the evening. Furthermore a wooden cabin is pulled up next to main building serving as workshop for repairing old bicycles and working on wood, knitting machines are bought to offer knitting courses to widows and more teachers are employed adding to a total of 28 fully employed co-workers at the Our Bridge education program in Iraq.
The 1st of March 2018 is the first day of school of the re-imagined education program. On that day from early morning to late afternoon 285 children take part in the program. The different classes are put together in account of age and state of learning.
The classes taught are:
The teachers in the educational program and the caregivers in the orphanage are the heart and hand of Our Bridge.
They are friends, mentors and confidants. They are a second family.
The young team in Iraq is led by Paruar Bako (founder of Our Bridge e.V.) and Jihan Schamo (head of the education center). Currently, Our Bridge employs 27 permanent staff in the Kurdistan-Iraq region. The statutes of the association stipulate that the management of the educational program must always have a dual leadership (woman and man).