Cesme | Turkey
On the ground, we provided refugees with relief supplies and taught children on the run in mobile schools.
Type of help
Education
Material
Food provisions
accomodations
Project partner
STELP
İmece İnisiyatifi
STELP is helping since
2016 -2020
Since spring 2016, we have supported thousands of refugees on Turkey’s west coast near Izmir – coordinated from our field office in Çeşme. The sea route from there to the European Union in Greece is only about eight kilometers. For countless people, the small port city became the last stop before crossing to Europe for this reason.
Together with the Turkish association İmece İnisiyatifi, we provided people in need with food, hygiene items, clothing and stoves in makeshift camps and provided them with emergency supplies after their crossing failed. This was followed in 2017 by the construction of the İmece village, a self-sufficient village that is almost self-sufficient.
Vegetables are grown in the village fields and the surplus is sold at the market. There is also a small school, a kindergarten, sports and playgrounds, and a workshop. The village is inhabited exclusively by women and children who have suffered particularly severe blows in the past. In various workshops, the women are taught to produce goods that are then sold at the market. These are the first small attempts to give them a largely self-determined life and restore some of the dignity that many of them lost during their flight. In recent years, more than 200 volunteers trained by STELP have provided on-site support to the İmece team.
Another of our projects in Turkey aimed to prepare refugee children for school. Education is an essential foundation for refugees to build a life with prospects outside their home country, experience integration and increase their self-esteem. Without prospects, the only alternative for many is to board unsafe boats in the hope of having a future in another country. Our goal is to prevent such risky ventures as part of our measures to combat the causes of flight. Although every child in Turkey has the right to education, in order to participate in regular Turkish schooling, they must pass a language test. With the help of a mobile school, STELP and İmece prepared the children for this test.
We are incredibly proud of how many people in Turkey we have been able to help, together with our partner İmece and the support from Germany. In 2020, however, the time had come to reorganize our activities for that year and beyond and to devote ourselves to new tasks and challenges. Im Jahr 2020 war jedoch die Zeit gekommen, unsere Aktivitäten für dieses Jahr und darüber hinaus neu zu organisieren und uns neuen Aufgaben und Herausforderungen zu widmen.
