For the first time we won’t go to the refugee camp that we have supported during the past years. We will meet two contact persons in Gaziantep camp, in order to give solid ground to our future activities. We will then move to Kilis, where we intend to run a project to support families facing extreme conditions. The meeting in Gaziantep is very important and cannot be postponed. The camp has no organization and no NGO is there to support, apart from few occasional activities. We are the only ones trying to provide a regular supply of food, medical care and essential goods, critically needed in winter time.
Within the camp we are supported, but outside we don’t have many connections. We decide, together with the two contact persons, that we will start the following activities: we will bring food packages every other month with their support, we will start a school project and we will try to support more closely the orphans (more than 100) living in the camp. During winter time we commit to provide what is needed to stay warm. This is an extremely big challenge, in financial terms, since we are a small organization. I personally (Arianna) am really concerned, but we do want to give this project a try, since no one else is there to help. We will try to cover more than 1000 children and almost 500 families facing conditions of real deprivation and despair. In order to achieve our goals, refugees will be divided into small groups and we will look for donors who will take charge of each group. We will also write down a project in order to increase financial support.
In Kilis we selected 22 vulnerable families and we will connect them with 22 Italian families who will provide them with food and school supplies for children. These are usually families where mothers, often widows, don’t know how to feed their children and have no solution rather than sending them to work. Some of them have to take care of disabled children and/or elderly relatives. Fathers are often missing, or they are mutilated and disabled, so they have no opportunity to work. Our goal is consequently to support these families by providing essential needs, so they can at least feed the children and send them to school. In Kilis, unlike Gaziantep camp, they do have schools and we want to give children the opportunity to attend them. This is the only way they can save their lives.
