TEHRAN – A German teacher and tourist who came to visit Iran in the Iranian calendar year 1385 (March 2006-March 2007), decided to build a school with three classes in the rural areas of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, southwest of the country.

The name that Brend Rose gave to his daughter “Elizabeth” now shines on the door of a rural school in Iran. Elizabeth School is located in the village of Lama in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province.

As philanthropy knows no boundary, a tourist mountaineer turns into a school-building benefactor.

After traveling to the Zagros Mountains and getting to know Iranian people, Rose went to the Dena slopes in the Zagros Mountains. Lama is the closest village to the foothills of the Zagros in the city of Dena, so it became a tourist destination for Rose.

After three days of mountaineering in the beautiful nature of the Dena foothills, Rose was surprised by the hospitality of the locals. All the residents of Lama village welcomed him and hosted him in the best possible way during his stay of one week.

Rose, as much as enjoyed locals’ hospitality suffered from the deprivation of these people, so he decided to contribute to the construction of a school. He donated 20,000 euros of the savings from his teaching salary.

Now Lama village and Elizabeth School are like his country, he still comes to visit the school and the locals. He praises the school and the villagers wherever he goes to show the real picture of Iranian people.

The remote village of Lama is now popular with Germans and Brend’s students.

Thousands of classrooms built by charities

Hadi Zarepour, director-general of provincial education department said that 2,700 classrooms in urban and rural areas of the eight cities of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province need to be reconstructed and retrofitted.

The number of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad schools in the three levels of education is more than 3,000, he noted.

So far, 1,585 classrooms have been built in this province with the participation of local and foreign school-building charities, Jabbar Kianipour, chairman of the association of school-building charities stated.

Currently, 64 schools are being built in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, he added.

It is predicted that 25 schools out of these 64 schools will be completed and opened by September, he said.

Hearts bigger than bank accounts

Iran has many school-building benefactors amounting to 650,000 people inside and 1,000 people outside the country. 20 to 30 percent of the country's schools are constructed by philanthropists whose hearts are bigger than their bank accounts.

In line with the document of the fundamental transformation of education, people who have a popular reputation are being invited as ambassadors to attract public participation for school construction, Mehrollah Rakhshanimehr, director of the organization for renovation, development, and equipment of schools has said.

It has always been thought that only a certain number of people who can afford to build a school, but all the people can participate even by buying a brick through this scheme, he added.

He further explained that a system is set up in which under-construction projects are introduced and users can select each project and pay as much as they can to build the school.

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