Rise Now for the Syrian Refugee Children

Greetings from BTF,

We are entering a new year full of hopes, having finished an impactful year in 2016, we feel privileged to have such strong supporters like you throughout the year, and enabled us the means to deliver 6 programs (shared in our previous reports) investing in various education and enrichment programs for the refugee children, and their mothers.

As you all know, the political environment and global support is not better than last year, or the previous 5 yrs since the mass migrations began. Non-profit efforts like ours, and a single donation you make has never been more important in the place for humanity... What is the price of giving hope, improving the mood or happiness of a single refugee child? At the end of the day, what is left out of a child if there is no hope or any dream to dream about..

Today, we will talk about a program we supported in late October - early November in partnership with an organization called "World At Play" (WAP). Before we get into the details of the project, we would like to calibrate you all about the situation and the pschology of the targeted children we targeted for this program.

Based on UN statistics, Turkey hosts now over 3 million refugees of which 50% are children, and more than 80% of the refugees live outside the state owned - operated refugee camps. These offcamp refugees are distributed in major cities and in the eastern part of Turkey, in border cities. Majority of these children live on slums, in survival mode and they work on streets trying to make a buck or two without much empathy from the general public. They are truly marginalized, and lack any sustainbale support environment or any good development guidance like what a school or community education center can provide. Majority of the children are out of any formal school, or been that way for soo long. These are the children living on the streets that we are used to seeing in the most undesirable conditions.

We planned and created a play program to target these refugee communities in Izmir, the 3rd largest city in Turkey. Our project partner has 10+ yrs experience working in orphanages, street children, care homes and the children with behavioral problems in Balkans and Europe. The project volunteers worked for 12 days in Izmir and the surrounding areas of Foca, Torbali and Turgutlu, as well as in the city slums and through multiple sessions, reached and integrated close to 600 refugee children. The group leveraged another local partner volunteer organization to assist in logistics, and targeting of children groups, and neighboorhoods. Each day groups of children were gathered together to be part of adult supervised play and craft activities. The number attending each session was unpredictable, anything between 25 and 100. Great adaptability was required and a wide range of games were prepared and delivered. It was rare that a child walked away from the sessions. It was great to see that children smiled, they laughed, and they showed us their positivism, humor, silliness against all the odds, and what they have been going though in their childhood. We truly felt that the refugee children and their parents appreciated this kind of care and affection. Pure play gave them the opportunity to be a child again even for a short time. Maybe for the first time in several years they had fun because of the project activities. 

1. Can we thank you enough?
2. Can we make you feel what we felt with these children on the field?

Probably not, but we want to thank you for supporting us in enabling this project and various other education and enrichment programs in the last year. Simply, we want to thank you not turning a blind eye on these children. Please take a look at the pictures below. We are grateful to GlobalGiving as being our non-profit partner to expose and promote our work, connecting us to a group of passionate supporters like you. We are continuing to invest in new programs in 2017 and in the children's future. We have 2 projects in our pipeline that are yet to launch, and look forward to sharing these further with you in the coming months.

Thank You from the bottom of our hearts!

Links:

• Short scenes from the project - video