Overview

WHF was started in Moria camp by its founder, Zekria Farzad, a journalist who escaped from Afghanistan and arrived on the isle of Lesvos in Greece with his wife and 5 children in February 2019. He immediately felt the urgent need to provide attention and education to children in the camp and started teaching english to them with just a whiteboard on a bench in the Olive Grove, the hills of olive trees surrounding the refugee camp of Moria where the camp had spreaded. Thanks to the support of the local refugee community in Moria, that firstly offered their own tents to host lessons and then helped building the first official class of the school (a 25 square meters tent made of scrap pallets and plastic sheets), Wave of Hope for the Future have grown steadily, offering classes in English, Greek, German, French, Music and Art (from 7.30am to 22.30 Monday to Friday) with 44 teachers to over 2.700 students at the time that the school was burned down during the fire that destroyed Moria camp on the 8th and 9th of September 2020. In the meantime also some of the refugee teachers were moved to other camps in mainland Greece and started new schools there. After just one and a half year WHF operates schools in five refugee camps across Greece with over 4.000 refugee students: Lesvos (inside the One Happy Family community after the fire destroyed the school and the entire camp of Moria in September 2020), Athens (Malakasa and Ritsona camp), Thessaloniki (Nea Kavala camp, Dimitri Hotel) and also in Afghanistan (in the Farza district, one hundred kilometers north of Kabul), where we are rebuilding and refurbishing a school that was destroyed and abandoned when the Taliban were occupying that region. Our schools have become an important support platform for our people, not only for education but also for community organization and emergency aid.