Amber Çakar, Grants and Partnership Manager of the International Blue Crescent Relief and Development Foundation (IBC) speaks to us about the recent earthquakes in Türkiye, the impacts and what is needed now.
Services for children are a key part of IBC's response ©IBC
We're a Turkish organization founded in 2000, so we've been around for almost 23 years and have been operating in Türkiye,the MENA region, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia for the past 22 years. Currently we have ongoing projects in Türkiyeand eight other countries in the region.
As one of the one of the biggest Turkish organisations, we already had project sites and offices in the areas that were worst affected by the earthquakes.
We already had a well-established community centre in Kilis and a sub office in Hatay for coordination for our northwest Syria projects. We also have an office in Azaz and we've had an office in Damascus since 2007, when we implemented projects for Iraqi refugees.
From the very first hours after the earthquake struck, we had hundreds of community members coming directly to our Kiliscommunity centre. Luckily that building had a strong structure, so we immediately started coordinating some safe spaces for children, for women and organising clothes and blankets and hot meal distribution which continue today. As part of IBC’s response, we have scaled up dramatically on shelter, food, WASH, psychosocial support, child protection, and health assistance
.
We share a lot of the same struggles so we can share our learning and experiences, south to south.
At this stage there are so many needs still, but I think many international audiences don’t realise how much shelter is still needed. People are living in tents or makeshift shelters, in the bitter cold of winter. This is also a protection and privacy issue, especially for women and children. IBC is focusing on container homes as a more appropriate shelter solution in multiple provinces. One month on, shelter remains a very important need.
From the very beginning our staff have been active in this emergency and it has affected them quite a lot. Luckily all our staff is accounted for but there were colleagues in other organisations that unfortunately, lost their lives. Even though they are also affected, our staff have continued with their best efforts in the emergency response while dealing with personal tragedy, many sleeping in their cars. We have a colleague in Hatay who lost multiple immediate family memberswho was arranging funerals while coordinating projects and donations at the same time.
I know from the NEAR coordination meetings and the other forums that many other organisations have lost colleagues and we share our heartfelt condolences.
This disaster is on such a massive scale that it is going to take a very long time to recover, this is just the beginning.
We are asking the world not to forget about us and not to give up on supporting us, as there are many organisations like us in the field and there are still many ways to offer support.
One of the challenges we have experienced in this response is coordination and information sharing at scale. This is an area that we really appreciate about NEAR because they gave us a little push to coordinate and created a space to collaborate and share information between Turkish and Syrian local actors responding to this emergency. We share a lot of the same struggles so we can share our learning and experiences, south to south.