Welcome to Finland

Learning Finnish language these days is becoming quite difficult with a big amount of immigrants in Helsinki and just a few schools available.

Two weeks ago I visited one of the most active organizations in this field which is called the Al-Birr organization in Malmi, where I found many of my camp friends who moved to Helsinki lately.

The Al-Birr Organization works for immigrants (asylum seekers and refugees) by teaching different levels of the Finnish language for free, helping to reach integrity, and encouraging them to invest their time through pushing them to do voluntary work in their profession.

Approximately 200 students from different countries and gender attend their lessons every day from 10:00 to 16:00, so it is normally very crowded whenever I go there. There are three classrooms; big, medium and small which are full of 40-50 students, 20 students and 15 students respectively.

Every student here has to study 2 hours per day, five days per week for 3-6 months per level. They have 14 high quality teachers – 6 of which are of immigrant descent – to teach non-English speakers the language.

This is the head office with the director Mrs. Saadia which almost full of registering people:

The big classroom with only some of the students because few people left the classroom and didn’t want to be in the photo:

The Medium classroom with some of their students (a few students left this classroom too for the same previously mentioned reason):

The small classroom with some of their students:

My thanks to this organization that makes huge efforts toward immigrants. I hope the other related organizations benefit from their experience in this field, and assist them by taking some of the burden to be more organized in the future.

One of the immigrants,

Ammar Al-Kaysi