Hayden, Colorado, a town of less than 2,000 people, has that typical neighborly ranch attitude of “let’s help where we can.” This was personified last year by Rebecca Walker and Kendra DeMicco, teachers in the local high school of approximately 110 students. Rebecca and Kendra developed Project Justice, a hands-on elective course to expose the 9th to 12th grade students to social justice issues. While studying issues such as poaching in Africa and homelessness in America, a group of 12 students decided to tackle the Syrian Refugee Crisis, specifically those who have fled to Turkey. There are approximately 1.7 million registered refugees in Turkey. According to Mercy Corps, over 50% of Syrian refugees are children who have lost everything including their home, schools and families.
Obviously what is needed is money to provide necessities such as soap, toothbrushes, shoes, clothes, plus for their schools pencils and paper as well as computers. The students in Hayden involved with the Syrian Refugee Crisis placed jars in all the stores in their town hoping to collect money from the local people. They appealed to nearby towns with larger populations such as Steamboat Springs where they prepared a Turkish buffet charging $5 per person.
They posted on Facebook, Twitter and on a blog that they were selling $10 T-Shirts promoting “Syria’s Children.”
In the end the students had raised over $3,000 which in Turkey where a teacher earns less than $60 a month is a meaningful sum.
At the end of the school year Kendra DeMicco went through the halls of the school and collected tossed out pencils, pens, unused paper, binders and anything else she could find. The students and their parents contributed personal hygiene products, all of which Kendra stuffed into airline luggage. With her own money she then bought an airline ticket to Antakya, a Turkish town on the Mediterranean, and close to the Syrian border, to where she delivered the filled suitcases. The money her students had amassed will go to support a new Syrian Free School in Antakya, fund the installation of a computer lab, and will buy supplies and furniture to accommodate the rising number of refugee children.
Rebecca is no longer in Colorado but Kendra plans to continue the project this coming school year. They are still selling T-shirts on http://www.gofundme.com/s9b8us.
Edith Lynn Beer is a freelance author/journalist/lecturer. Her articles have been published both here and abroad including in The Sunday New York Times, The Denver Post, Elle, and Berlin Tagesblatt. She gives seminars on writing at Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs. Edith is our ground reporter from Denver.
From Denver:
LETS HELP
WHERE WE CAN
By Edith Lynn Beer