Turkey and Qatar open orphanage compound for Syrian kids

Hi all!

This is what we filmed in Reyhanli, Turkey's border with Syria. On 18 May 2017, the orphanage for Syrian kids was opened and we were there. 

The war in Syria started seven years ago. During this time, as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said, the war affected more than eight million children and continues to do so.

The Syrian children have lost their parents, siblings, and friends. In May 2017, a complex was built as a co-operative project between the Turkish ministry of Family and Social Policies, IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, and Qatar’s Sheikh Thani bin Abdullah Foundation for Humanitarian Services (RAF).

We had visited the orphanage on the day it officially opened. The establishment, built in the south-eastern border town of Reyhanli, consists of 55 villas, four schools, a mosque, playgrounds, a medical centre and a sports arena. The complex is host to about a thousand children who have been orphaned by the seven-year-long war in Syria.

According to the Office of United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, since 2014, Turkey hosts the highest number of refugees with the number at 3 million. Within this amount, about 2.7 billion fled from the war in Syria. Turkish authorities claim that the number is much higher than this, since some refugees weren’t able to be registered.  

As UNICEF explained, there are about 800,000 school-aged children in Turkey where about half a million of them are enrolled to a school. With the world’s largest orphanage in the world, the number of children getting education is expected to increase.

We had spoken to some children in the village. One of them was Yusuf, from Aleppo. His grandmother was looking after him two years ago. She left him here, on the Turkish side of the border. We asked him if he could remember his father, he said: “No, I don’t remember him, but I miss him every day.”

 

Fatima is another child we spoke to. She was 9 years-old and from Hama. Her father died in Syria and she had said she hadn’t seen her mother in three years.  

The co-ordinator of the RAF-IHH Children Life Centre, Hamza Cakar, sees the efforts they’ve spent, as their duty, saying: “Everything starts with love. Love together with education. By education I don’t mean only reading, narrating, writing. We teach them here how to sit and stand at home, how to behave towards elders, how to convey their love towards the little ones, at the same time, using scientific means we teach them how to serve humanity in the best way.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfhG1GOst3I

We visited the mosque where children were playing with the staff. Even though the people in charge know they’ll never be the childrens’ genuine parents, they do whatever they can to help them for a beautiful future.