The war in Syria has been going on since 2011 and over the last 4.5 years about HALF of Syria's population has been displaced! About 7.6 million are internally displaced and roughly 4 million have escaped into neighboring countries.
About 1.7 million are in Turkey, the country I call home, and that is a low estimate considering many refugees are unregistered. The needs are overwhelming and hearing such big numbers can sometimes paralyze us, but we need to do something. We cannot sit idly by as the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time is unfolding.
Although Turkey has remained open to Syrian refugees, funds have been stretched thin and many do not get the help they so desperately need. So we are trying to raise as much money as we can through our non-profit, Get Bridged.
In 2009, Joel and Adam (my brother-in-law) started Get Bridged. They were originally working with artisans in Africa selling fair-trade products. Then an opportunity opened up to partner with some friends in Turkey who were serving handicapped children. They started a full scale sewing workshop, teaching the parents of handicapped children how to produce newly designed Get Bridged tote bags. Then they sold them and had 100% of the profits going to the families of the handicapped children. The project provided temporary employment for the parents and generated income for the families, but it wasn't sustainable in the long-run.
So Get Bridged was put on hold in 2014 to figure out what direction we wanted to take it, but with refugees flooding into Turkey and the needs being so great, we began collecting donations to buy supplies for some refugee camps in south central Turkey.
Joel and Adam took a couple of trips there, and I even got to go once too (you can read about it here and here). And recently we heard about some friends of ours going regularly to a refugee camp close to where we live. Yesterday I had to opportunity to go there and serve alongside of some of these amazing people distributing food and playing with the kids.
Thank you to so many of you who have already donated towards the purchase of food and supplies! Please keep on giving - we will be trying to go into the camp once a week to help distribute food and other much needed items like diapers and baby formula. So please, please consider making a donation! Go to www.getbridged.org to donate! Even if it's only $5, every little bit helps!!
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| Loading up the food (noodles, lentils, bulgur, chickpeas, tomato paste, milk, flour, sugar). |
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| Packaging the food into bags for the families (there were about 100 families at this camp) |
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| All loaded up and ready to head to the camp. We were waaay overweight and a little worried about the tires (and getting fined by Turkish authorities). |
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| At the camp. It was a little chaotic and our friends are still trying to figure out the best system for distributing the food. 4 of us played with the kids to try to keep them out of the way while the others delivered the bags of food to the families. We had balloons but quickly realized that was a mistake. There was so much pushing and shoving and I'm thankful no one got hurt. We ran out of balloons really fast and then I tried to organize a game of duck duck goose with the younger kids (many of them have learned some Turkish) which was fun. Then we got out some bubbles and that went a little bit more smoothly than the balloons. |
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| Praying for healing for a painful knee |
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| My sweet friend loving on people |
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| Having fun with the kids. They were laughing at me as I tried to learn their names and pretty much butchered all of them. But at least it resulted in some smiles and giggles :) |
