It all started with simple acts of kindness in the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep, right on the border with Syria.
When Chen Wei-tzu (陳韋慈) brought two bags of clothing to a nearby refugee camp, or when Anny Teng (鄧馨庭) and her husband Jan Tiangco provided food for Syrian refugees and drove them to fetch water, they did not think that this was the beginning of something much bigger.
“It really was one thing leading to another,” Chen says.
Photo courtesy of Love and Hope Ministry for Syrian Refugee
At the time there were only four Taiwanese in Gaziantep, but Chen and Teng worked independently and did not meet until 2014. Since then, along with Tiangco, they have been working together to seek and provide educational opportunities for refugee children — although in reality, much of their work involves helping families with basic needs such as food, shelter, job-seeking and even marriage counseling.
Eventually, their efforts culminated in the establishment of a school for Syrian children in the Oska neighborhood and most recently two learning centers for English and computer classes.
Although all three have returned to Taiwan, their efforts continue through their organization, Love and Hope Ministry for Syrian Refugees, with Teng planning to visit every three months to check in on the classes and families.
Photo courtesy of Zoe Chen
ACTS OF KINDNESS
Chen was a Turkish major at National Chengchi University, and moved to Gaziantep in 2010 to teach Chinese at a local university. She says life was pretty simple in the beginning — but about a year later, the Syrian Civil War broke out.
“I noticed more and more Syrian children begging on the street,” she says.
Photo courtesy of Love and Hope Ministry for Syrian Refugee
Her first contact with the refugees was when she took two bags of clothes to a government-operated Kilis refugee camp about a 40-minute drive away, as she had planned to return to Taiwan.
Chen ended up not leaving Turkey — and started feeling that she should do more for the refugees. She tried purchasing blankets for them in the winter, but found that after shipping, the NT$10,000 she spent only amounted to 28 blankets, and there were more than 15,000 refugees.
“At that time I felt so powerless,” she says. “I started rethinking about what I could do. I was a teacher — so education was a possibility.”
She gathered some friends and obtained permission to hold an English-learning event inside the camp. They also brought stationary and food she obtained at a discount from local businesses. About 80 children participated.
Chen eventually stopped because she was busy with her work and studies, and she also felt that there was not much she could do.
A year later, Teng arrived as Tiangco accepted a teaching job in Gaziantep. Teng says Tiangco, who taught for nine years at Shu-Te University, was looking to move to a war zone like Iraq or Egypt, but the couple later settled on Turkey out of safety concerns for their three daughters.
“We knew the refugees were there, but we did not know much about them or their situation,” Teng says.
Teng started helping refugees with basic necessities. Many of them did not have much in Syria to begin with — and took nothing with them in their haste to escape the violence. Soon, providing for refugees became too much to handle with just the family’s finances, and on a trip back to Taiwan in 2013, Teng started to make presentations and raise funds for her endeavors.
Chen’s desire to help the refugees was reignited after she met Teng.
“Anny told me that even if you can help one person, it counts,” Chen says. “It’s worth the effort and money to make a kid smile. She’s not like me, who kept questioning if I really made a difference. She simply takes action.”
EDUCATION FIRST
Through helping the families, Chen and Teng noticed that many Syrian refugee children were not attending school. Teng says Turkish people did not welcome Syrian children in their schools and there was no government school for Syrians in the Oska neighborhood that they focused on.
Some families did not think that their children needed to go to school, especially girls. Many children even had to go work in restaurants because their parents were unemployed.
The first family they helped was a young couple who had been sleeping at a gas station for a week with their two young children. Teng helped them find an apartment and later asked if they were willing to provide their living room as a classroom and help teach kids from the area.
“We did not want to just give them money every week,” Teng says. “We wanted to find something for them to do.”
The classroom was a success — but soon the Turkish neighbors complained about the activity in the apartment and got them evicted. The couple went back to Syria, taking most of the content. Teng never got her deposit back.
Teng and Chen decided that there needed to be an official Syrian school for the children in the neighborhood. It was a long process because they needed to provide data about the neighborhood and resources, gather signatures from the refugees and also deal with government officials who were not exactly enthusiastic.
In December of last year, the school opened its doors, and now has over 100 students attending.
Not all families were fully cooperative. Chen says they often discovered that some children were missing from school, and had to track them down and speak to the parents — even threatening to cut off financial and material support.
Meanwhile, they continued to help families get settled — usually for the first three months — and sometimes even had to enlist Tiangco, who teaches psychology, as a counselor for families that were having trouble such as domestic violence.
“We think education is important, and it’s the only way that Syria will have a future,” Chen says. “But before that, we still need to provide immediate help.”
HOPE FOR THE FUTURE
Teng returned to Gaziantep last month and was able to get two new classrooms to teach English and computer classes. They just installed furniture and are now raising funds to set up the Internet and purchase hardware.
“With computers, they can interact with children in Taiwan,” Teng says, “so they know that the world is a big place and there is a lot they can do, and not just focus on the pain of their situation. There are people who care about them.”
During the same trip, Teng visited a family whose children had been attending school and asked what they wanted to do when they grew up.
The eldest daughter wanted to be a doctor, the younger one an engineer and the son wanted to be the president of Syria.
“I said, ‘Just focus on your studies and we will help you,’” Teng says. “They kept nodding their heads. When you see these kids, and they start to have hope for the future, it is very, very touching. And that makes me willing to do anything for them.”
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