WE'LL COME TO YOU.

Since we aren't on every social media site, let us come to you. Enter your email below and we'll send you our monthly handwritten newsletter. It will be written during the hours of moonrise, and include featured posts, wild tangents, and rowdy stick figures. 

Keep the beautiful pen busy.


Brooklyn, NY
USA

Handwritten is a place and space for pen and paper. We showcase things in handwriting, but also on handwriting. And so, you'll see dated letters and distant postcards alongside recent studies and typed stories. 

When I Know the Value | Story

THE STORY:

IN 2008, the gates to Zabuli Education Center opened. The elderly men were of the first to enter. 

They approached Razia Jan, the founder of the school, and pleaded with her to build a school for boys instead. "Men," they told her, "are the backbone of Afghanistan." Razia's response?

Well, the girls are the eyesight of Afghanistan. And unfortunately,
you are all blind. 

The seven girls above were in the 4th grade when they enrolled in 2008. It was historic not only because there were no schools for girls only in these rural regions of Afghanistan, but because in the past, women were not allowed to go to school, for some of the very reasons that these seven girls faced in their own lives. 

IN 2015, the first class of graduating seniors said goodbye to their educational careers. Or so they thought.  

In eight years, they had learned how to read and write, but they had also learned how to dream, and so when students across the country applied for college, they did, too. The only difference?

The college they applied to didn't exist. Or at least, not yet.


Razia Jan did not build a school - she built possibility. When praised for what she is doing, Jan is quick to say it is not what she wants, but what the girls want to do: and what the girls wanted to do was go to college. So Jan raised $120,000 and built the first-ever, free private college for women in Afghanistan. 

IN 2016, What Tomorrow Brings will premiere worldwide, documenting the construction of this dream. 

It takes a village. When the foundation went in for The Razia Jan Institute, it was the elderly men who laid the first stones, and as they did, they offered words of prayer to their daughters.

We hope God gives these people the will to help this school until the end.


It also took Beth Murphy, Director of Principle Pictures. She was there when ZEC laid its foundation. She was there when The Razia Jan Institute laid down its foundation. And she was there when the girls wrote their letters. And when they did, she started the impact campaign that raised the $120,000 for the college in eight weeks.