Amirified - Charity In Iraq - Blog 3

One of the things I've been working on despite being flat ass broke is charity and helping fellow Iraqis of all ages reach a better life even in the slightest. Few years back I've met a man named Hisham Al-Dhahabi (Or thahabi ), the man of course had a goal in his grown up life and that is to help orphans or kids with parents who are unable to support be it due to sickness, being locked up or what has become a regular word in Iraq Death.

Under a banner of the charity we started that says "Children and youth of the Iraqi safe house"
Stands Hisham in the middle surrounded by children that he keeps at his own house

After meeting the guy he talked some heart breaking stories of children he's come to known and tried to help but wasn't able to due to lack of finances, so the project we had was cancelled before it even started since I was more broke than he was. but it 2 years after meeting when I was contacted by him again and told me that we need to do something to help out the kids in Iraq and find them a shelter and the tools to get education and food, I sarcastically but seriously suggested "Maybe you should have them at your house. lo' and behold within the same week we started arranging his house to host as many kids and children as we could, he had 1700$ and I had about 300$ after selling a playstation 4 and PES game I won at a tournament and we ended up hosting over 9 kids at his house and with the help from others we managed to reach 13. while we were (are) grateful for getting about 130$ we still were mad because we were seeing charities beat us in huge numbers and all of those charities were centered around one thing: Building mosques, as a Muslim I obviously never had a grudge a mosque but the fact of the matter is I have 5 mosques around my house and a small temple (That also serves as a mosque) within a walking distance from my small apartment.

But the main reason we were mad and frustrated is because we weren't able to help out more kids, it's ever so often that we walk around and not find a kid between 5 and 10 years old begging us for money or trying to sell us water (A deceivingly optimistic picture of such can be found here https://steemit.com/photography/@amirtheawesome1/7q9rsy-iraqi-photographers)

Hisham as the face of the charity got a big boost from UAE sponsored contest titles "Hope makers' where he got around 100,000 Dirhams (around 54k dollars) in which not one dime was spent on neither of us but was used to hire more people to help us out and buy a bigger house for the kids (Turned out that a 4 bedrooms house is too tight for kids) which sent us on a bigger struggle to get government help. In a country that hands out lands and houses and free money to religious groups it was too hard for us to get help to build a house for orphans, we weren't looking for steady payments to help us take care of kids and their clothing, food and education (God forbids someone touches the money given willy nilly to religious groups) but were merely asking for either to be provided with land and we'd build the house, or vice versa, we even suggested giving the government the entire prize money and they'd do both for the kids. But it wasn't till we raised more money and spent much more time and effort were they helpful and had us pay most of our money just for the land but were able to build the house with the help of people and even the kids help out (Sounds cruel but we needed all the help we could get)

Now we host 29 kids and it's in the rising including these 4 who had their mother dying on them and their dad sent to prison for drugs (Use and dealing)

We even found extra money to help out some elderly folks

It's a long, hard and tiring road that we took, one that will only (Much like a penis) get harder and longer, but it's one that we see the result of in every smile we see in every kid holding a school book instead of a box of tissue to sell and sleeping in beds instead of the hard concrete