It has been a very busy couple of weeks for our project in Diyarbakir! Our hotline is working and it is now guaranteed that it will continue to work at least for a full year. We signed the contract with an analyst to produce a report of all the calls we receive which will help bakad apply to further funds to continue the Hotline even after this.

In the last weeks our focus has been on the community center. The arrangements we have made to the budget, particularly shifting the funds originally reserved for my living expenses and return flights to the community center have been extremely productive, and seeing it take shape is very fulfilling. It will probably take a while for our dust to be settled but it is well worth it.

The Bakad Community Center has three sections: a conference room, a film screening area, and the Library of Peace. In the last weeks all the furniture we ordered has arrived, and we almost completed the rest of our direct procurements. Now we are trying to organize the center and advertise its services, so that the community can benefit from what we have been creating here.

The conference room is equipped with a large round table suitable for meetings and workshops with 16 people. The room already had an AC which is crucial in the scorching Diyarbakır heat, and the portable projector we have can be used here by anyone who would like to use slides. We expect individuals to use this area for the workshops and meetings they propose themselves through our Google Form, and it will also serve as bakad’s main working area.

The film screening area is now almost complete as well, with our projector, seating for twenty, and thick blackout curtains that turn the room into a pretty convincing screening area. Individuals will be able to propose events in this room as well, but bakad is already planning to have weekly movie screenings in this area to bring the community together. The idea was born out of the calls they have been receiving in the hotline, where individuals expressed a need to come together and meet other like-minded women and LGBTİQA+ individuals in person.

The Library of Peace is coming together nicely as well, despite the mountain of cataloguing we still need to do. We now have six large shelves in this room, and we moved bakad’s own (now former!) desks in this area so that people can use the library not only to check out books but to work or study in the area. We expect the main consumers to be students, academics, and other NGO workers in the area, but I already received interest and excitement from a large number of people, who are just happy to meet other like-minded individuals. We want this space to act as a symbol of Peace, but it also fills a real gap in the region. Through the rather extensive research I have been conducting in the city’s public libraries I realized that books on Kurdish ethnicity and gender equality do not really exist here. Upon conversation with library workers, I learned that all the books acquired in the libraries affiliated with the Ministry of Culture have to be approved by the Ministry, hence these books do not get procured. The other libraries affiliated with the local municipality expressed that they would like to have these books (and in fact they have a number of them) but they do not have the funds to procure more.

As we do not have the budget to purchase books, my strategy has been to get in contact with the publishing houses either through email or through my personal networks. My college professors have been incredibly supportive in this endeavor, and so far we got 45 to 70% discounts from four large publishing houses. Another one also agreed to donate fifty books of our choice, alongside making a 50% discount on any others we may want to purchase. All these books are recorded and catalogued, and marked with our library’s seal. These will continue to arrive into our library well into October, and both bakad workers and I will continue to work on the project.

Lastly, we produced various informational materials about both the Hotline and the Community center to be distributed around Diyarbakır. Our A3 size posters explain what the Hotline does and what the Community Center is. Both posters have QR codes on them so that people can access our website and fill out the Google Form to either participate in our events or propose their own to be done in the Community Center. We produced these large posters to be distributed to various allied NGOs working in human rights and feminist politics. We have A5 sized leaflets as well, which we will distribute to local cafes so that customers can pick them up while paying their tab. Lastly, we have small stickers with nothing but our QR code, and the line ‘Queers Look Here’ in the Turkish LGBT+ dialect that only queer people and their politically active allies speak. We have been distributing these everywhere around town being mindful of security concerns.

Through our work this summer, bakad has already become a center of the community. Not only we have helped individuals directly through the Hotline, we provided valuable training and physical resources in the region. In fact, bakad has just got accepted into the Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights Platform through our work at the Hotline, which is a European Union project and which will make our work even more likely to be sustainable. I will be wrapping up my stay in Diyarbakır and returning to Chicago soon, but our work and impact will continue here.