With our hotline operational and in good working order, we have time to go back to some of the issues we have been postponing, making necessary edits, and start thinking about the other components of the Bakad Community Center.

We want to make sure the hotline works properly and has the most impact over the longest period of time. We have been doing several things to this end. First, we increased the working hours of the hotline to every day 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM. We hope the increase in the number of days will provide additional predictability and stability to our callers. We also decided to start our shifts later in the day because we realized that practically all of our calls arrive after noon, and we are the busiest towards the end of the day. Secondly, we started a new advertisement and outreach campaign. Multiple times a week we create posts for bakad’s social media accounts that provide different facts about the hotline, answer FAQs, and allow for user feedback through polls. We boost these through Meta’s ads tool as well for greater visibility. Lastly, we have been contacting various non-LGBTQ+ organization in the city and the region so that they can suggest our hotline to their affiliates. We also want to create posters and leaflets both about our hotline and about the information we collected (of local resources on substance abuse, HIV, domestic violence, renter’s rights, etc.). That said, there have been two bombings by right-wing religious groups over the last two weeks in Diyarbakır, targeting two cafes known for their modern, secular views and artistic events. Hence, people in the region are hesitant to display any material that involves certain concepts (LGBT, HIV) and symbols (rainbow colors) and we do not want to risk putting anyone or any establishment in danger.

Lastly, we started planning for the bakad Community center in these last weeks. With the external funding I received for my living expenses in Diyarbakır and my flight back to Chicago, I was able to make some amendments to my budget, which also increased the funding I have for the furniture and electronics we can provide for the space. Bakad offices currently have two large tables and some chairs for the office workers, with a working kitchen, and two rooms used as storage for the donations they collect for LGBTQ+ people and last year’s earthquake victims. Our plan is to use our funding to get proper furniture for a meeting space in bakad as originally planned, but we also think we can do more since we have some additional funds at our disposal. First, we want to transform one of the storage rooms into a Library of Peace, which will have books and articles on peace studies, human rights, civil wars, transitional justice, and Kurdish-Turkish relations. This space will be open to public by filling an application which bakad workers will have to approve. Secondly, we want to organize a space for large screenings, with a movie projector and some (rudimentary) seating. We want to organize LGBTQ+ related movie screenings open to the public in this area to increase the strength of the LGBTQ+ organizing in Diyarbakır and foster stronger connections with people (especially young adults) who can also become members of the NGO and volunteers on the hotline in the future.

To make sure both the community center and the hotline succeeds and develops in a self-sustaining way, we also continue to apply external funding sources with all sorts of projects. We have plans for a Kurdish language gender-terms dictionary and almanac, an app for women in Diyarbakır to provide safe spaces for feminist consciousness raising, and a Kurdish language queer-feminist short story workshop which will be published as a book afterwards. The opportunity Davis Projects for Peace provided to this small NGO in Southeastern Turkey that allowed me to work with them and increased their material capacity makes all these future plans possible, and we are all very happy to be part of this experience.

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.

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.

Our hotline has its volunteer operators! Last week we had our preliminary meetings and agreed with 8 of the applicants. They are a diverse cohort, Turkish and Kurdish, men and women, straight and queer, ranging from their 20s to late 30s. We had our first meeting yesterday on June 14th, to meet each other (all the volunteers, NGO workers, and professional trainers), get to know bakad, and discuss on our shared community values and ethical commitments.

This meeting had to be online as I am waiting for the Kurban Bayrami (the Eid al-Adha) to end on June 19th, before moving to Diyarbakir and our trainers are living in different cities in Turkey. Plus, we decided that it makes little sense to fly the trainers to Diyarbakir for the training sessions. Nevertheless, it is very important for volunteers to meet in person and develop the interpersonal relations that are crucial for this hotline to remain operational. Our conversations with other NGOs who attempted similar projects in the past warned us that the most important thing for a hotline is volunteer retention, so we want to make sure there are enough interactions to develop the relations of trust and mutual responsibility among our operators.

In the meantime, we figured out how to navigate the Turkish tax law in signing our service procurement contracts, and we distributed the subjects to be covered in the training program to the next two weeks, so that the hotline will become operational on July 1st as originally planned. According to this revised program, we will start right after the Eid al-Adha:

• Thursday, June 20th, 18:00 – 21:00
  – Turkish Criminal Law: Rights and Obligations in Theory and Practice
• Sunday, June 23rd, 10:00 – 14:30 and 13:00 – 15:00
  – Foundational terms and approaches in LGBTQ+ issues
  – Myths and Reality: LGBTQ+ experiences, prejudices, and misinformation
  – Discrimination and Internalized Phobias
  – Facts of HIV: Prevention, Transmission, Treatment
  – Talking About Substance Abuse and Addiction
• Saturday, June 29th, 10:00 – 13:30 and 14:00 – 17:00
  – Providing Emotional Support and Personal Boundaries
  – Approaching Risky Cases: Talking about self-harm
  – Talking about Coming Out of the Closet
  – Talking about Relationships and Sexuality
  – Turkish Renters Law: Theory and Practice
• Sunday, June 30th, 10:00 – 13:00 and 13:30 – 15:30
  – Talking about Sexually Transmitted Infections
  – Talking about Gender Reassignment Processes
  – Role-Play Session
  – Communication Best Practices: How to be an effective team player
  – Summary and Technical Information: How to operate a hotline

This also means that we will be connecting with lawyers, psychologists, social workers, and compiling all the information our operators will be referring to in the next two weeks! It will be a mountain of work but meeting the volunteers and hearing their experiences and commitments pushes us forward.

We have our training program! Through the help of the therapists, social workers, and lawyers we found, our training program has taken shape. We will have a total of 20 hours of training and roleplays, followed by a week of internship and monthly supervision meetings. Our training program will be composed of the following sessions:

1. Bakad Meet and Greet: Our shared policies and ethical principals
2. Foundational terms and approaches in LGBTQ+ issues
3. Myths and Reality: LGBTQ+ experiences, prejudices, and misinformation
4. Providing Emotional Support and Personal Boundaries
5. Approaching Risky Cases: Talking about self-harm
6. Discrimination and Internalized Phobias
7. Talking about Coming Out of the Closet
8. Talking about Relationships and Sexuality
9. Talking about Sexually Transmitted Infections
10. Talking about Substance Abuse and Addiction
11. Talking about the Military Service
12. Turkish Criminal Law: Our Rights and Obligations
13. Local and National Resources on LGBTQ+ Litigation
14. Role-Play Session
15. Communication Best Practices: How to be an effective team player
16. Summary and Technical Information: How to operate a hotline

Once we had this hourly plan, we also started talking about the payments we will be making to our therapists and lawyers, and gladly came to an agreement. We are now trying to figure out the best way to sign the contract and procure their services, in terms of the various tax implications involved.

In the following week we will be having interviews with the applicants, to make sure they volunteered for the right reasons and carry the motivation to continue in the project. My partners at bakad are truly incredible in organizing this interview schedule and taking up the brunt of the work. Some of our volunteers said in their application forms that they may return to other cities, which means they may not be in the bakad offices to mend the hotline in person. We are looking for solutions, exploring various prepaid central phone line companies originally designed for small private businesses. Currently the systems Kobikom and Karel appear very useful, so I will be getting in contact with them to get quotes.

I arrived in Istanbul, Turkey this week, with the computer for our community center, and a luggage full of International House swag thanks to I-House Chicago’s generous donations to the project!

Over the last week we received a number of applications to serve as volunteers on our hotline, thanks to the daily social media posts from bakad and several other LGBTI+ NGOs in Turkey who agreed to circulate our project, but we decided to extend our recruitment period one week to make sure we have a full cohort of volunteers.

We had our first planning meeting with the two therapists who will be providing the bulk of the training, and learned about the issues and topics they saw as necessary to go over in the program. These include the fundamentals of providing emotional support, understanding risky cases (such as physical harm and suicide calls), and the most common call types. They will be getting back to us with a draft program, after which we will finally sign our contract.

Both of these psychotherapists have worked and volunteered on similar help lines, and they told us that for the longevity and success of a program like this, the most important thing is getting the correct group dynamics. Volunteer work only continues if people feel the good they do on a daily basis, enjoy the solidarity they share with like-minded individuals, and act with a sense of responsibility. They told us that we should organize social events and opportunities for our volunteers to get to know each other better. They also told us that the ideal group size is somewhere between 6 to 10, to make sure the line is tended to at all times, but the group is not too big to be incohesive. We will be following their advice as we form the hotline group and we will also explore different options in enlarging the group in the future.

In the meantime, we also met with several social workers through one of the representatives from bakad, and talked to them about the project. They were very excited about it and even agreed to work with us on a volunteer basis, not charging us at all! They will be providing two sessions of the training, and will help us compile and design the leaflets, posters, and other informational materials we will produce in the following months. It is this kind of solidarity that makes projects like this possible, and we feel indebted to their generosity.

Lastly, since my own trip to the site of the community center is fast approaching, I am trying to find a suitable place to stay which would still be in budget. With the earthquake, the rents are obviously very high, so I hope I will be able to find a room close to the bakad offices and the community center.

The bakad LGBTQ+ Support Hotline is looking for its volunteers! Our registration forms and pamphlets were completed over the last week, and we circulated them through bakad’s social media pages today. We are very excited to see what kind of turn out we will get. Information on the hotline will be available permanently on bakad’s website soon as well. We are also in contact with numerous other NGO’s in Turkey to circulate the news for us, on their social media.

This week we also interviewed some social workers, one of whom is a sociologist who was very enthusiastic about helping us, and we made some headway in purchasing the electronics for the community center before I travel to Turkey on June 1st. It is finals week at UChicago so progress is slow right now, but more updates to follow on both accounts!

Over the last two weeks we had meetings with various LGBTQ+ NGOs across Turkey to get their advice and enlist their support for our project. SPoD, UniKuir, and Lubunya Deprem Dayanışması (LGBT Earthquake Solidarity) all provided invaluable guidance for our project.

We have now started working on “mapping” the subject areas the hotline will provide service to. This will help us design the training program, but it will also allow us to organize what bakad can provide in terms of further resources, options for advanced paid/unpaid assistance, and transform all this information to posters, pamphlets, and online resources for the LGBTQ+ community in the region. While these areas may change once we open the hotline, there are currently seven:

1. Individual rights within Turkish Criminal Procedure Law
2. Right to Housing, related laws and practices in Turkey
3. Psycho-social Assistance and Mental Health Resources
4. Gender Reassignment Therapy resources
5. Information on Turkish Compulsory Military Service
6. HIV prevention and medication interactions
7. Resources on dealing with Substance Abuse

We already know that there will be questions on temporary housing, but this will be one of the areas we do not envision being able to assist people, considering there are no local resources. We might add this as an eighth category in the future. We were told that enlisting the help of professional social workers with experience in the region would be useful in this “mapping” so we will start exploring our options for paid or volunteer assistance in this regard as well.

We contacted and interviewed various lawyers and psychologists to provide the volunteer trainings, and we reached agreements with one or two individuals from each profession. The format of the training and the exact dates/hours will be determined with our trainers, but based on our conversations with SPoD, who have a similar hotline based in Istanbul, we expect to have 10 three-hour sessions. This will be followed by two internship sessions, in which the trainees will answer the phones in groups. Plus, we will have monthly check-in meetings with our volunteers, to make sure providing this service does not adversely affect them, to re-think our personal boundaries, and our own emotional well-being.

We are working on our advertisements to circulate the news and hopefully our form to recruit volunteers will be live soon!

Our project is slowly materializing! Together with the input of BAKAD, we drafted our master schedule for the project, starting with the last week of April. We have a good sense of when exactly various recruitment, advertising, construction, and training phases should start and finish, to make the best of this Davis Project.

Given our schedules in Chicago, Istanbul, and Diyarbakir, we decided that the first cohort of trainees should ideally start on the first week of June and the second cohort should start on the first week of July. Each training program will take 4 weeks, followed by a month of supervised hands on experience minding the hotline. We also decided that one week of each training session should be attended by a legal professional who can provide guidance on the best resources for those answering the phones. For this reason, we decided to allocate a quarter of the funds reserved for procurement of services to employ a lawyer. Apart from joining in the training, this lawyer will be helping us draft the informational material the community center will be providing. For now, we settled on three topics that concern the LGBTQ+ individuals in this region: the legal resources in Diyarbakir and the surrounding areas individuals can reach out to free of charge to get legal aid; training in fundamental rights including most importantly renters rights in Turkey; and training on Criminal Procedure Law as it pertains to the interactions individuals have with operatives of the state.

I also learned through BAKAD that the devastating earthquakes and the intense economic crisis have hurt people not only physicallly but also psychologically in this region, giving rise to two issues. The first issue is drug use. Particularly among sex workers who are required to work more with rising living costs, and because some of these individuals who are HIV+ cannot access reliable information on the dangers of various drugs and their interactions with HIV medication, increased drug use is posing a serious threat. A second problem that emerges now in conjunction with the hard living conditions is the increasingly common practice of extortion through dating apps. An organized wave of criminal extortion emerged in the region, in which victims thinking they are dating other LGBTQ+ individuals are tricked, and forced into various actions with the threat of disclosing their sexual identities to their families. In line with these developments, we decided that we will also connect with the medical and legal associations to figure out the best ways to alleviate these problems.

In the following weeks, we will conclude our conversations with the other national NGOs and figure out the best way to employ the individual who will be training our volunteers. Unless we can find a volunteer psychotherapist, we will start advertising a position to employ the person, and we aim to secure a contract for the procurement of services by the 4^th week of May. In the meantime, I will contact the Istanbul Pride March committee to learn more about their HIV and drug use informational materials produced several years ago, and figure out the best ways to update and reproduce these for 2024 onwards.

We realize now that our task is challenging, creating and formalizing repositories of knowledge and constructing a community center that LGBTQ+ individuals can always depend on in the region. Yet, we are excited to get to work and exalted to be chosen by the Davis Projects for our task.

We had our first meeting with BAKAD this week to discuss the specifics of the project implementation, agreeing that several stages of the project should ideally be completed before I reach the field (Diyarbakir – Amed) in June.

Our project has two prongs. The first one concerns building physical and human capacity to transform BAKAD into a community center that can provide the necessary material and informational resources to the discriminated individuals in the region. The second prong aims to create a cohort of trained volunteers in the Southeastern cities, who can keep a hotline for individuals to reach out to. We agree that these activities will have to be implemented simultaneously to maximize the impact during the grant period.

Chronologically, our first task is to produce a list of community organizations, trade associations, and NGOs whose help we will enlist in creating the networks of medical and legal professionals who will agree to help LGBTQ+ individuals, and ideally provide a discounted rate.

Our second task will be to advertise the training program and the hotline on May 15th, which will be done through social media in conjunction with various other LGBTQ+ organizations in the region. Based on the interest we get in the first week, BAKAD volunteers will go to the field in person with workers of another local organization (Keskesor Amed LGBTİ+ Organization). We will continue advertising the hotline and the community center throughout June, and start producing the informational material.

Once we have a sense of the demand from the region, we will have a better idea on how to structure the training program. Here, we will be enlisting the professional help of a psychotherapist or social worker, who will create the training modules for us. We were offered help by another LGBTQ+ organization (SPoD in Istanbul), in providing this training. We will assess our options depending on the demand we get throughout May. We would like the first round of trainees to arrive in Diyarkakir-Amed and start the training on June 15th, so we can have at least two cohorts of trainees throughout the summer.

Here, we are also facing our first challenge. Most individuals in this region go to larger cities as seasonal workers in tourism or agriculture. Individuals staying in the Southeast often have multiple jobs including full time positions, jobs in the gig economy, or sex work, meaning they cannot volunteer too much of their time. We are considering the best ways to create an inclusive and supportive environment at the community center, so that those interested can afford to participate in the program. We already planned on providing the teaching materials to the trainees free of charge. We are now considering whether we can also offer bus or train tickets to those who will come from the neighboring cities, provide travel costs to the center, and provide food during the training sessions at BAKAD. We will see whether it is possible to lower the staffing costs and increase this portion of our expenses, by enlisting the help of SPoD, among other organizations.