You can Light a Candle too-University Scholarships

Dear donor,

We are deeply saddened with the two devastating earthquakes that caused massive damage in eleven cities in southeastern Anatolia.

CYDD has about 3500 scholarship students from the area and about half of them are university students.  We immediately set up a on-line crisis center and tried to reach every one of the students and asked about their needs. 70% of them had to leave their damaged houses and had to stay elsewhere or slept outside or in their cars.

The day after the earthquake we started transferring 1000 tl to their accounts to cover  immediate needs. We then focused on individual needs through our crisis center of 200 volunteers who worked 18 hours every day and coordinated the needs with various sources of supply.

CYDD has 8 local branches in this area and they were a safe haven for the students in need .

 At the end of the second week we could secure a permission to transport to Kahramanmaras and Hatay standard food and hygiene boxes bought by individual donors from the source we specified and CYDD headquarters team and students distributed these to nearby villages where rescue efforts were negligible.

After the eartquake many families had to leave their unhabitable houses and moved to nearby cities of Mersin, Antalya, Izmir, Malatya and Ankara where they were given temporary lodgings. With this internal migration, CYDD branches in these host cities started to accept new applications for scholarships. At the moment we have accepted 350 university students from various levels; some are seniors, some are freshman and we believe this number will increase at least to 1000. We will be incorporating these students into our scholarship program and support them until graduation. Most students had to leave their personal belongings in the damaged houses and we plan to give them computers if we can raise enough funds.

So dear donor, in these extraordinary times we need your support more than ever to integrate these students into the schooling system.

With our kind regards,