Year after year, Saudi Arabia has been making it into the news for setting record after record. In 2017, the largest picture mosaic was formed by people in the Kingdom on World Diabetes Day. In 2018, Saudi Arabia held the world’s largest camel sporting event. This year in February, it set the world record for largest falconry festival. Just four months from managing its last awe-inspiring feat, a local volunteer foundation is putting the Kingdom on the map once again, this time for purely altruistic reasons.
According to Arab News, Ehtiwa broke the Guinness World Record for number of clothes collected (towards end of Ramadan), an achievement that was made possible through its larger campaign called “Keswat Farah.” The initiative, which is now in its eight year, was launched in the Kingdom’s capital Riyadh and Eastern Province. This year’s edition saw nearly 2,000 volunteers collect over 500,000 pieces of clothing donated by members of the public. After collection, all items were categorized, cleaned, and sent to the “Keswat Farah” showroom for visitors to collect.
Beyond setting a spectacular world record, the foundation also made headlines for its volunteer composition: most of its 2,000 volunteers are women who collectively spent over 200,000 working hours on making sure the campaign met its objectives, its key goal being to collect over half a million items for 2,700 families in need.
Speaking to the news site, Ashwag Al-Nashwan, head of media and marketing for Ehtiwa, said, “Families are not given pre-selected items, they can go ‘shopping’ and choose what they like […] One of our missions is to ensure that families in need are treated with dignity and respect. Seeing smiles on families’ faces is the greatest reward our organization and strong community of volunteers can ever receive.”
