The Society of Friends of the Children’s Village Haluaghat is headed by Marc Klawitter in Germany and by Maqsuda Afroz and Rainer Ebert in the United States of America.

Maqsuda Afroz was born in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh in 1979. She grew up in Australia, Bangladesh and India. After completing her secondary school education at South Delhi Public School in New Delhi, she went on to study Physics and Space Sciences at the Indian Universities of Delhi (B.Sc. 2003) and Pune (M.Sc. 2005), respectively. Recently she completed her dissertation on Dark Energy at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Heidelberg University (Ph.D. 2010). Maqsuda Afroz has been an active member of numerous nonprofit organizations and dedicated to the promotion and popularization of science. Since 2005 she has been working with our Bangladeshi partner organization Ekmattra. She taught physics at European Standard School (ESS) in Dhaka from 2006 to 2007.

Rainer Ebert was born in Ellwangen, Germany in 1985. He completed his high school education at Hariolf Gymnasium there in 2004 and went on to study Philosophy and Theoretical Physics (Diplom 2009) at Heidelberg University. He was president of the Interdisciplinary Study Group on Animal Ethics for two years and is co-editor of the anthology Tierrechte – Eine interdisziplinäre Herausforderung published by the Harald Fischer Verlag in 2007. Rainer Ebert was a lecturer for Logic and Mathematics at the university and community college from 2006 to 2008. His commitment towards the disadvantaged whether human or non-human dates way back to his elementary school days during which he made and sold magazines. The money collected was donated to a children’s hospital in Senegal and various animal welfare organizations. Currently, he is doing a Ph.D. in moral philosophy at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Marc Klawitter was born in the Black Forest, Germany in 1984. A believer in early starts, he became involved in local political and social projects in his first years at school and has not looked back. In 2004 he founded Cantamus – a society for the promotion of new church music – and has been its president ever since. He completed his school education at a commercial high school in Heidelberg in 2005, and went on to study nursing at the local university hospital. During a two-month stay at Katutura State Hospital and Windhoek Central Hospital he was introduced to health care in Namibia. Since graduating in 2009, Marc has been working in the Heidelberg Department of Neurology’s stroke unit. He likes exploring far-away countries, his Volkswagen Transporter and his motorbike.