After we had built the Malawi Orphanage, our first fruit of the support and donations of hundreds of students from dozens of cities participating in the Bookmark Project, our second permanent work turned out to be a school project in the Pattani region in southern Thailand. Boğaziçi School was opened in October 2013 and celebrated its first graduates in 2017. Nine of our successful graduates are continuing their university education in Turkey within the scope of International Diyanet Scholarships.
In our school, 360 children are educated in the languages of Arabic, Turkish, English, Thai and Malay to international standards. The mothers of the orphan children who are unable to afford education for their children due to poverty in the region, are able to send them to the Pattani school and protect them from child labour and various dangers they may face at any time outside the school.
We hope that our school will be a glimmer of hope in the lives of the orphans who are the most vulnerable group of social life and whose futures have become uncertain under the current circumstances in Pattani. And we also intend that our school will positively influence their upbringing into educated adults able to be the best they can be.
We completed the school project costing 300.000 TL with the donations of thousands of volunteers and the operational support of the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation which has been conducting field work in the region for years. Then we handed its operational responsibilities to the IHH.