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Seattle team building innovative schools in Afghanistan

A Seattle team is helping bring education and hope to a war-torn country on the other side of the globe. They're building schools for girls in Afghanistan, and some of their designs stand out.

A Seattle team is helping bring education and hope to a war-torn country on the other side of the globe. They're building schools for girls in Afghanistan, and some of their designs stand out.

“It gives them confidence, it gives them a feeling that they have a special place in the world, so it can be very impactful,” said David Miller, an architect and founding partner of The Miller Hull Partnership, a Seattle firm.

Miller Hull and a team from UW worked with Sahar, a Seattle non-profit, to design and build the Gohar Khatoon Girls' School in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. The Janet W. Ketcham Foundation funded the project.

The school, which opened in 2015, wowed students and a global architecture community, with its innovative design. The building's layout helps circulate air, naturally, in the summer. Students' body heat helps keep it warm in the winter.

Miller said he was “extremely surprised about how well it worked.”

“To get the reports back that it's functioning so well and it's so comfortable in the building is fantastic,” he said.

Now they're working on a second girls’ school. This one will be a boarding school, a first for the country, and a model for other regions. They hope to start construction next year.

“They can't build democracy without people being able to read and write, and with democracy and economic opportunity comes many more options for us to have peace,” said Ginna Brelsford, executive director of Sahar.

She says the organization hopes to keep building schools, and a teacher training center, to empower the next generation.

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