Now that our trainings have started, so much is happening and things are moving so fast!

Two financial developments happened. First, I have been talking with a number of NGOs and funding agencies, and it looks like I will be able to cover my flight from Turkey to the USA and my accommodation without using any of the Davis Funds! This means that we can allocate some of our budget to other areas, which I will discuss with both the Chicago I-House and the NGO. Second, the funds from the Davis Projects arrived, which I immediately transferred to a Turkish bank account. I need to use Turkish Lira’s in Turkey, the country’s national currency, but I also cannot exchange everything right away because the exchange rate fluctuates daily! Hence, I decided to make expenses and exchange dollars to liras as I run out of funds to make sure we navigate Turkey’s precarious economic situation.

Bakad is situated in central Diyarbakir, an incredible city some 850 miles southeast of Istanbul. The city is located in the northern end of Mesopotamia, where the first human settlements emerged about 13,000 years ago! Since then, it housed many civilizations, which is visible in the enormous Roman walls and aqueducts, Ottoman inns, Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian churches, and the numerous mosques.

Sadly, it is also a city that was center of at least 40 years of ethnic conflict, and the effects are visible in the city. It is easy to observe graffiti declaring “End to Drugs” or “We are not Gangs, we are Families” on the streets, and experience how the streets shift from well-preserved history to run down houses and the bizarre new construction that started after almost a quarter of the old town was burned down in 2015-18.

With our first in-person session scheduled on June 20th, I had to make travel and accommodation arrangements with haste. I arrived in Diyarbakir (Amed, as it is called in Kurdish) on the morning of the 20th, left my bags at the room I found, and came straight to the NGO. I finally got to deliver the computer I purchased for bakad in Chicago, and all the great gifts I got from I-House. The banded notebooks in particular were a hit with the volunteers, and they certainly came in handy taking notes from the torrent of information our lawyers, therapists, and social workers were launching at us.

We had our first official training meeting on the evening of the 20th and the second one on the 23rd. They were both conducted hybrid, with some of the NGO workers, volunteer operations, and trainers in the bakad offices in Diyarbakir, and others on Zoom, in Istanbul, Izmir, and Hatay. The volunteers all reported that they had incredibly fruitful experience, which should not be taken lightly as listening to 3 hours of legal training is no small feat! The bakad offices are modest but modern, with a small kitchen, where I have been trying to organize some tea and light snacks, followed by lunch. This became handy particularly on the session on June 23rd, since the training session was almost 5 full hours. I am deeply impressed by our volunteers, whose commitment and attention would put UChicago grad students to shame!

And one last note: It became clear over the last weeks here, that not only state repression but political Islam is a threat to the LGBTI+ and women at least in certain areas of the country. In the last local election in Turkey, a long forgotten Kurdish-Islamic political party and movement re-emerged in support of (and through the support of) the ruling party. Named HUDAPAR they are not merely a political party, but also a broader movement with ties to the Hizbullah, with strong views against LGBTQI+ persons and performances, both in public and private spaces. As a result, we are constantly required to balance between making connections, asking for support for our project, getting in contact with representatives from the local government and university, and advertising broadly on one side; and caring for the security of the NGO and our volunteers on the other side. For this reason, at least for now, I decided to preserve these incredible people’s names and faces in these blog posts.