Our LGBTI+ Support Hotline is operational! The last ten days have been incredibly busy but we now have an operational hotline in Diyarbakir-Turkey, the only one of its kind in the entire Eastern half of the Turkish Republic and the Kurdish regions across the Middle East!
Throughout the week of June 24th, we finished all the operational requirements to open our hotline. We got our virtual phone service through Kobikom, a mid-sized VoIP (voice over internet protocol) provider, and decided to use Zoiper, a virtual phone software to receive the calls. Our number is 0 (850) 888 21 45, which we took because 21 is the city-code of Diyarbakir, and all the other options (like 888 21 21 or 21 00) have been taken or incredibly expensive. We have been circulating the hotline on social media, but we also decided to purchase some ads on Instagram to increase our visibility.
Also during this time, I spent an incredible amount of time finishing our Volunteer Handbook, which is currently a 65 page “booklet” with all the information our volunteers may need to look up in responding to callers. It includes various techniques used by therapists and social workers, factual information on all our training subjects, and lists of professionals who are inclusive of the LGBTI+ in their practices. I also drafted a “map” of all the Turkish LGBTI+ NGOs, and all the relevant social work hubs in Diyarbakir, marking which opportunities and services they provide among the subjects we work on. I am very proud of both these documents.
We had the last two days of training on June 29th and 30th, starting at 10 AM and ending around 6 PM on both days. Some of the topics, particularly the legal issues around renter’s rights and the processes of gender reassignment in Turkish courts and hospitals have been challenging, and there were a lot of questions to our trainers. Yet, as we reached the end of the training, we also had time for some role-plays which were incredibly helpful. I can also speak for everyone that things started to feel very real!
Our hotline started working on July 1st, with two volunteers holding 2 3-hour shifts. We are operational on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, 10 AM to 4 PM. On these three days we worked, which is the “internship period” for our volunteers, we received many calls, which demonstrated the incredible need for the service. We talked to people whose partners did not know they were not heterosexual asking about STDs, we had trans people searching for doctors to learn about hormone treatments, we gave advice to young adults who were scared about coming out to their parents, and many, many more. Some of the people called us to merely talk and feel less alone, while others called to tells us that God will punish us, showing the great variety of people and opinions towards LGBTQI+ people in Turkey. We manage to help some people in need, anger others, and have to admit some needs exceed our current capacity here at bakad.
I am sure we will be learning a lot more as the weeks pass by, but it is already clear that our hotline must remain operational. This is also why we also started writing an additional funding application to the The European Endowment for Democracy (EED), presenting this summer’s work as a pilot for the larger, more comprehensive projects we devised.