In pictures: How Red Crescent touches old and young lives in Turkey’s Cizre
The southeastern border district of Turkey has gone through many challenging periods due to PKK’s terror campaign. But the Red Crescent’s Volunteer Center inspires people to have hope.
Cizre, an ancient border town located next to Tigris, one of the Middle East’s great rivers, has survived many troubles, including PKK terrorism between 2015 and 2016. The townspeople had to navigate its tactic of digging trenches and ditches across the district.
Five years later, the southeastern district bordering both Syria and Iraq is in a better shape, thanks to the Turkish Red Crescent Volunteer Center’s humanitarian projects and support programs.
Here are some pictures showing the humanitarian group’s efforts to improve the quality of life in Cizre, which is predominantly a Kurdish-populated town.
Red Crescent volunteers, Sevval Imrag and Fadile Dakak, natives of Cizre, have developed a project, which shows movies to school kids in the town’s villages as they are served popcorn and lemonade.
Volunteers of Cizre Red Crescent collect trash occasionally to make their city clean. In the picture, they are working in a field hosting the city’s old castle area.
Zeynel Em, the head of the Red Crescent’s volunteer center in Cizre, leads a tree planting activity, which has continued throughout every year, and is participated by students and teachers.
Many young students of Cizre come to the volunteer center’s peaceful study room almost every day to prepare for the national university exam, which places students in different schools across Turkey.
Cizre Volunteer Center of the Red Crescent also helps young students work on stone painting and amigurumi, a Japanese art of knitting small yarn parts to produce stuffed toys.
The center gives project training sessions to Cizre’s young students to help them develop their own projects in a better way.
The Volunteer Center has a big library, which stores more than 2,500 books, all of which were donated by either government institutions or individuals.