Visiting refugee camps in Eastern Turkey, where I was traveling recently as a correspondent, I was appalled at the conditions I witnessed firsthand. Upon returning, I decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign in support of children living in the camps. The thing they need most of all -- and it might sound counterintuitive -- is to be able to play.
Thousands of Yezidi refugees, belonging to the Kurdish ethnicity fleeing from ISIS, were living in tents surrounded by dirt, mud, despair and hopelessness. Their faces were all too familiar to me because I too spent time as a child living in a refugee camp. The hours turn to days, the days to weeks and months, and even years. One girl told me she had been there for 366 days. She counts each day.
The United Nations and other NGOs are doing what they can to provide shelter, food and water. But as we all know too well, the spirit needs more than basic necessities. It needs hope and a glimpse of a new tomorrow.
The adults in the camp don't always have the energy to give the children the attention they need because they are focused on survival. What the children lack most is how to fill the long hours of each day. Many fled their homes under cover of night and threat of death and didn't bring a single book, toy, ball or doll.
I recall one girl, five years old, sitting in the mud and playing with the blue lids from the water bottles that the UN provides. She called them "her new toys." She said: "I left my doll in our apartment. I actually locked her in a cabinet." She continued to play, adding sticks to the blue lids to create a doll-like figure. "I wonder if she is still there waiting for me," she whispered. I looked up and her grandma was standing behind her in tears. I went to her and she told me in a quiet voice that the little girl's mother died the night they fled, as a bomb fell on their home. "We told her that her mother stayed to protect the doll," she tells me.
I have visited many refugee camps during my years as a journalist and filmmaker. It is the scenes like this one, with small, innocent hands playing in the dirt that will stay with me forever.
That's why I have chosen to raise money to bring a little joy back into their lives.
Toys like dolls, stuffed animals, jump ropes, games, crayons, soccer balls, are a small but important comfort for traumatized children who have lost their homes, or perhaps even their parents, siblings or relatives.
We are keeping it very simple to start. We are seeking to raise $50,000 to purchase and deliver these items to the camps.
We are working in partnership with the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, known as TAPS, a U.S.-based organization skilled and experienced in working with survivors and victims of trauma here at home for U.S. military. They have a global humanitarian vision that includes TAPS and the TAPS family of survivors reaching out to help others around the world who are suffering loss and deprivation.
You can help. Just a small donation can put a small on a child's face and bring back the memory of a happier time. More importantly, it can keep their spirit alive and give them hope that there is a brighter future ahead.
That is why I want to keep their spirit alive by helping them remember what it is to be children. What it means to laugh and play and forget, for just a moment, about the stark reality. Learn more about the campaign here.
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