June 13, 2019
On May 24, a student exhibition “A Million Smiles for Peace” was opened in the hallway of the 1st floor of the European Humanities University (EHU) Campus. This exhibition is a result of the project by Hezbullah Shafaq — the Erasmus+ program exchange student of the American University of Central Asia, who spends his spring semester at EHU.
A Million Smiles for Peace is an international campaign that aims to promote peace, solidarity, and acceptance among people from different nationalities and countries. This campaign is aimed to capture and collect one million smiling portraits from different ethnic groups throughout the world to promote peace, unity, solidarity, resolve conflicts and destroy the stereotypes that separate humans beings from one another. The mentioned campaign has been started on January 1, 2016, in Kabul, Afghanistan and it is currently running in 25 countries of the world. Since the start of the campaign, the organizing team was able to organize exhibitions of the captured photos in several countries across the world.
Hezbullah Shafaq is an Afghan student at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and currently, he is doing Erasmus+ exchange semester at EHU. He is the founder and director of New Hopes of Afghanistan Social Association and “A Million Smiles for Peace Global Campaign”. As a social activist in his country, Shafaq has been engaged in organizing tens of youth supportive projects not merely in Afghanistan but also in India and Kyrgyzstan. His goal for life is to work as a young leader towards enriching the lives of youth and making them capable of dwelling and contributing to the welfare of the community.
Source: EHU
Photo credits to Katsiaryna Ermolovich.