| May There Be NO MORE WAR in This World | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Li Mei-ru Translated by Tang Yau-yang Photos by Huang Shi-ze | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
A protracted civil war has forced four million Syrians from their country. Over two million of them have fled to Turkey. This number includes half a million school-aged children, of whom only 140,000 go to school. They have already lost their homeland; they can ill afford to also miss out on an education, perhaps their best chance for a better future.
"Nobody wants war. I pray that, after this ordeal, no one will ever need to give up all they have to seek safety in another county,” said Maya Ahmeth at a cultural center in the Sultangazi district of Istanbul, after receiving a gift debit card from Tzu Chi. She might have said those words on behalf of all Syrian refugees. Maya used to run a shoe shop in Syria before the civil war tore the nation asunder, forcing millions of Syrians to give up everything they owned in order to seek refuge in other countries. Like the others, Maya too had had enough of the civil war and she decided to leave. She gave up her home, business, and friends, and took her five children to Turkey, a destination that more than two million other Syrians have also chosen. The sixth largest city in the world and the largest city in the Middle East, Istanbul offers many job opportunities. Like a magnet, the metropolis attracts people to live there, including many Syrian refugees. More than 30,000 refugees have settled so far in Sultangazi. After the refugees gave up what they had back home, they faced a tough journey to finally make it to where they were now. But what awaited them when they arrived was not red carpets of welcome, but more daunting challenges at every turn. Like duckweeds—largely rootless, drifting to wherever the currents or winds take them—refugees drift to wherever they may eke out a bare subsistence. They do not have much control of the present, let alone the future. This does not seem or feel like their home, certainly not like a fertile ground into which they could put down their roots and nurture a fulfilling life.
Four-part challenges Tzu Chi volunteer Faisal Hu (胡光中) left Taiwan to study in Libya when he was young. Then he went to Turkey, where he has lived and run a business for almost 20 years. He has devoted much time in the last two years to the care of Syrian refugees in Turkey. In the process of helping them, he has witnessed their sufferings first hand. He has grouped their difficulties into four categories: shelter, employment, medical care, and education. Take shelter first of all. Keeping one’s family under a roof and out of the elements takes money. As the refugee population increases, so do rents for homes. With more people demanding living quarters, rents seem to go up every couple of months. A few numbers may help put things into perspective. It takes at least 700 lira (US$240) a month to rent a modest place. In winter months, add 300 lira a month for gas heating. That comes to a thousand lira. An adult refugee worker takes home about 1,200 lira a month, leaving his family 200 lira to pay for everything else—food, water, electricity, transportation, and children’s schooling, to say nothing about medical necessities or emergencies. It does not take a calculator to know that there is no way for a refugee family under such conditions to make it without outside help. Back in Syria, Nails taught at an elementary school. Her husband, a government official, was killed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Nails, her three daughters, and a son risked their lives to flee to Turkey. This young mother did not mince words: She told us that the rent was killing her. Nails is certainly not alone in feeling the bite of high rent. It haunts all refugees with roughly equal force. With rent eating up much of their money, they are left with little to furnish their homes. Any furnishings they may have—furniture, beds, TVs, even light bulbs—have likely been donated.
Hu pointed out that the second thorny issue facing Syrian refugees is employment. Refugees cannot work in Turkey, not legally. That exposes them to exploitation, such as low pay. Some adult refugees cannot find work because of their age. “It’s not that adults don’t want to work, but many of them are older than 38, and few employers are willing to hire them,” Hu explained. When that happens, necessity dictates that the children in the family become breadwinners. Child labor poses many problems, but the most significant is that the children are deprived of any opportunity to get an education. “There are new laws that prohibit children from working so they can go to school,” Hu said. “But the family will fall into financial straits if adults in the family can’t find work and the children have to go to school.” Medical care is the third challenge that often worries refugees. Syrians can go to public hospitals for free treatment, but the language barrier gets in the way between them and the Turkish-speaking physicians. “Private hospitals have Arabic-speaking staffers to facilitate communication, but only rich Syrians can go there,” said Hu. “The rest of them simply can’t afford it.” Najla Medratey, her husband, their four children, and three-year-old granddaughter are also Syrian refugees. Her husband cannot find work because of his age, and their granddaughter urgently needs eye surgery. The family, however, depends wholly on the income that their 28-year-old son brings home: 1,550 lira a month. After rent and utilities, they have about 800 lira left, hardly enough to provide a bare-bones living for the seven people in the family. Needless to say, they have been forced to put off their granddaughter’s eye surgery. Last but not least of the Syrian refugees’ worry: schooling for children. Six thousand families, over 30,000 Syrians, live in Sultangazi, and more than half of them are children. Fifteen thousand children need an education that the host country is not equipped to provide. Syrian parents can send their children to makeshift schools that concerned people have established for refugee children. They may also send their children to Turkish schools, but the barriers of culture, language, and expenses are difficult to overcome. Neither route seems ideal. Worse still, some parents might not let their children go to school at all. They might send them to work instead, depriving them of an education. Hu was also worried about another scenario: Kept out of school, the illiterate children might end up begging on the streets to help support their families, or they might even become vandals or thugs. They become social problems. Professor Cuma Serya, a Syrian refugee, has worked hard to provide schooling for Syrian children in Turkey. He identifies with Tzu Chi’s ideals about timely education for children. Fortunately, Sultangazi government officials are most supportive of Professor Cuma and Hu. Together, they surmounted many obstacles and opened El Menahil, a school for Syrian children, in January 2015. “Now the school has become a shining example in Turkey,” Hu said. When it opened, it was the only one out of 255 schools for Syrians in Turkey that did not charge tuition. Now the Ministry of National Education has declared that all schools for Syrians are tuition-free.
Aid distributions Hu, his wife, Zhou Ru-yi (周如意), and Yu Zi-cheng (余自成), three Tzu Chi volunteers originally from Taiwan, did their best to help Syrian children get an education. Along with more than a hundred Syrian volunteers, they visited the homes of all 1,800 El Menahil students to gather their family information and assess their need for assistance. To help the volunteers in Turkey organize aid distributions for the students and their families, a 23-person Tzu Chi team left Taiwan for Istanbul on the evening of October 16, 2015. Upon their arrival the following morning, they went right to work. Their six-day itinerary was packed. They visited the two El Menahil branches, surveyed a candidate site for the third branch, went to visit the homes of refugees, and held aid distributions, where they handed out debit cards, daily necessities, school supplies, and toys. Syrian, Taiwanese, and Turkish volunteers worked together to pack the relief items. “If one day Allah were to inflict war on Turkey to punish us, I believe that boys and girls in Syria would take us into their country,” said a Turkish student volunteer. “But I really hope it will never come to that.” Though safe in her own country, this young girl felt the terror of war perhaps just by witnessing and sympathizing with the misery of the refugee children. On October 19, Tzu Chi volunteers gave cash, ranging from 300 to 800 lira, to the families of 152 Syrian children who had had to work to help support their families. Those were the amounts that the children had been making per month. With this financial aid from Tzu Chi, these young people could stop working and instead attend El Menahil. During the award ceremony, a father shared an impromptu remark with the audience: “We’ve been here for two and a half years, and we’ve looked all over the place for a good school for my daughter, Eyye. We’d been unsuccessful until we came across El Menahil. It is the only school for which Eyye is willing to give up working. I’m sure she’ll cherish this opportunity and study hard.” Eyye went up to talk after her father. She told everybody that she was proud, not ashamed, to accept the money from Tzu Chi. She also said that she would make the most of the chance to study and that she would bravely defeat illiteracy and ignorance. Eyye’s father worked as a sewing machine operator. He worked exceedingly hard, from seven in the morning till nine in the evening. His 14-hour days were still unable to fetch enough money for their family, so Eyye had been working the past two years to help out too. It had been hard enough to make ends meet even on good days, but things had not been going well with the family lately. Eyye’s younger sister had long been hard of hearing, but she had taken a turn for the worse—about a month earlier, she had all but lost her hearing. They did not have enough money to buy her a hearing aid, so the family worked without taking time off for a whole month to scrape together enough money, 3,000 lira, to buy her one. Eventually they saved up the money they needed, and with the hearing aid Eyye’s sister can hear again. Two weeks prior to this distribution, Eyye’s mother asked if she wanted to go to school. Eyye replied that she needed to work for the income that the family needed, but that she wanted to study even more, even just an hour or two a day. Her mother asked Professor Cuma for help. Her request led to the aid for Eyye, which she will receive every month from now on while she is in school. “I’m sincerely grateful to Tzu Chi volunteers for coming from so far away to help us here,” said Eyye. “I wanted to go to school, but I had to work to help support my family. Now Dad and Mom can pay rent and buy food with the 800 lira a month from Tzu Chi, and I can go to school.” Professor Cuma also shared his thoughts. “I have two sons, Mohamed and Khalid. Mohamed, my first son, is ill. Please pray for him. Khalid has escaped to Europe, and he’s just 16.... I’ll forever treat your children like my own. Perhaps when I see Allah in heaven, I can show him some good that I’ve done.” Tears rolled down his cheeks. Many people cried with him.
Gassan Gassan Abdullah, 14, his parents, and his younger brother and sister arrived in Turkey from Syria two years ago. Gassan worked at a shoe factory, making 700 lira a month. His father worked at a clothes factory for 800 lira a month. After paying the rent, the family had only 900 lira to sustain five people for a month. Gassan wants to be an engineer. He needs to study to reach that goal. Now with Tzu Chi’s help, he and his siblings can all attend El Menahil. Esmaa, 33, Gassan’s mother, did not at first believe Tzu Chi’s promise to provide the children with tuition-free schooling and scholarships to compensate them for their lost wages. It just seemed too good to be true, and she had seen her share of broken promises from aid organizations. Now she is glad that Tzu Chi has made good on its promise. Esmaa has another worry at home. Her husband suffers from a psychological disorder which, when it flares up, totally changes his personality. He becomes a stranger, angry and edgy. He even curses and hits people violently. “When that happens, Gassan takes the blows from him quietly and submissively so that his father may quiet down quickly,” Esmaa said. Gassan, tears falling down his face, said, “I love my dad very much. I know that he hits me only because he’s sick. I just hold him tight and he quickly calms down.” Gassan’s father started to show symptoms when he was in military service in Syria, but he acted up at most one month out of a year. Since the Syrian civil war broke out, however, he has been symptomatic about six months a year. This has not only caused his family to suffer, but it has also disrupted his job. Esmaa is worried sick about her husband. “He’s a super nice guy when he isn’t ill. He knows nothing about his own illness and remembers nothing about what he has done to us when he recovers from an episode. We don’t have the heart to tell him the truth—we don’t want him to lose confidence. We do our best to help him.” Esmaa also mentioned that the war caused Gassan to suffer from suppressed appetite, which was later exacerbated or sustained by his fatigue and anxiety from working long hours. Medical treatment has not helped yet. Gassan is a good, mature kid. When Tzu Chi volunteers visited their home, he neatly arranged their shoes, which they had taken off in front of the house before going in. He also boiled water and made coffee for them. His considerate hospitality only made the visitors feel for him more, especially when they learned from his mother what he had been through in his young life. Esmaa told the volunteers that she would encourage her children to go to school. The debit card and scholarships that the volunteers gave them would in a measure help them along toward that goal. “I’ll study very hard, but if I have spare time I’ll still work to earn some money to help Mom,” Gassan said.
Fafma Ibrahim Demir, 35, is the education chief in Sultangazi. He has been very supportive of Tzu Chi’s work in Turkey. He flew to Taiwan some time ago to visit Tzu Chi headquarters in Hualien. After a four-day stay, he returned to Turkey with his heart brimming with joy. Then he spent three weeks helping to expand the El Menahil facilities. When the Tzu Chi aid delegation was in town, he showed them around. During a visit to a local school, Atatürk Kız İmam Hatip Oku, he remarked to a gathering of Turkish students and teachers: “Each of us should help Syrians. Allah tells us to do good and to help others, not just to pray and chant the Quran. When you see Syrians in the future, you should show them respect. ” Demir and the Tzu Chi volunteers also visited another local school, Mimar Sinan. Teacher Fafma Kaya approached the visitors and told them that she had once lived in one of the tents that Tzu Chi had provided for victims of a massive earthquake that hit Turkey in August 1999. She was 18 years old and in college then. Her school was in session when the earthquake hit. Her home in Duzce had collapsed, and many of her friends and fellow villagers had been killed. At the beginning of 2000, she and her extended family moved into the tent city that Tzu Chi had helped set up in Duzce. They lived there for two years before moving into permanent homes that the Turkish government had built for them. “Tzu Chi volunteers stayed with us for three months while the tent city was being built,” Fafma recalled of her first encounter with Tzu Chi 15 years before. “They cared about us. They gave us packages that contained a complete assortment of daily necessities. We were all surprised that they came to our aid from so far away. We were very touched by their help.” “My mother has been under the weather lately.” Fafma was talking as if to long-lost family members. “I know that she’ll be thrilled to know that Tzu Chi volunteers are here. I’ll pray for Master Cheng Yen and the volunteers.” Syrian refugee Rawda Alrais interpreted for Tzu Chi volunteers during the home visits. She had earned a master’s degree in England, and she taught at a public college after she returned to Syria. Her husband served in the Syrian military, but he did not want to kill his fellow countrymen. So they decided to take their two children and leave their homeland for Turkey. “We didn’t take anything with us when we left, only what was on our backs,” she said. A most graceful and genteel lady, she now teaches at El Menahil. She does not know when or if they will ever be able to return to Syria. Nobody does. As much as the volunteers would have liked to help Rawda Alrais and her compatriots, they were entirely powerless to return the Syrians to their country. All they could do was pray. Seeing the refugees’ misery, the volunteers feel fortunate that they have an easier life, and they know that they need to keep on providing aid to the refugees.
Editor’s note: In January 2016, the Turkish government granted Syrian refugees the right to work legally.
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